External Hard Drive - problems 1

[Chance1234]

I have a 40 gig external hard drive connected up to my USb 1.0 port on my laptop, it was all working fine until,...

I started getting errors such as

Write Delayed error , and cant write to $MFI

and now I'm not getting the drive appear at all, under the usb malarkey im getting the following

Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[MoLaker]

I can't really see the text on the graphics of the USB connections to make an educated guess, but have you tried the external drive on another machine to make sure it is not the problem?

 

[Chance1234]

I only have one machine, the text that is coming up is the following
||||||: <|:|:| ;; Device







Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[Chance1234]

Well ive got the drive appearing back, but cant run a defrag or write to the disk , coming up as read only volume



Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[bcastner]

RAW or truely read-only?

In any case, it sounds as if your MBR is corrupted.

 

[Chance1234]

what do i need to do if it is the mbr ?

Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[bcastner]

RAW or truely read-only?

 

[Chance1234]

cant get the error back, the driveis not appearing under my compter , im just getting the hour glass. i went to run typed f:/ and that went to the drive, and i created a text documetn no problem.

loading up defrag , now im just getting it hang.

Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[bcastner]

Defrag is not a good test, as there are lots of issues with drive locking.

Use Recovery Console.

. chkdsk /r d: (I am assuming D as the drive letter)
. fixmbr d:
exit

 

[Chance1234]

ok, update.

sorry omething i should of mentioned earlier is there is a partition on the external drive.

inserted the windows 2000 CD rebooted, bought up the recovery console , and it couldnt pick up the drives,

however when revbooting into windows , i got the chkdsk for E: (first partition ) when running through that it came up with the drive had bad sectors and fxed them. back in windows i went to run and typed chkdsk F: which comes up with "Warning F; Paramater not specified running chkdsk in read only mode. it has come up with the drive has errors , but chkdsk must be run not in read only mode.

about to reboot and see what happens.



Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[Chance1234]

many thanks for your patience, finally seems to be up and running ok, after many reboots, chkdsk and finally a massive 12 hour defrag.



Chance,

Filmmaker, gentlemen and forum1229

 

[McQueeney]

I had this same problem recently using a 160GB Buffalo external USB drive on Win 2000. Got repeated Delayed Write Failed errors. I finally put in a USB 2.0 PCI card in my desktop an that solved all the problems.