USB External Hard Drive problems

[coop]

I have a 250gig Western Digital external harddrive (passport i think it is) and its decided to be funny buggers.

I use it connected to the wii to store backed up iso's on but it was having trouble connecting so i formatted to FAT32 then to the WBFS format required for the wii.

The problem is whilst its 250gig in size once i get to around the 20-25 gig it allows me to copy another item over but once its finished it has trouble connecting back up and once it has connected the file is no longer there.

I downloaded some software from the Western Digital website but it fails on everything and does not try to fix it.

I tried another program called HDDRegenerator and that took about 12hrs and had only scanned about 4gig of the 250gig.

Anyone any ideas or is it fooked.

[Uncle_Meat]

Is it a pocket-sized one, powered via the USB bus?

I've been seeing more and more "knackered" external bus powered portable HDDS lately, all of them failing because, I can only assume, that with age and so on the HDD requires a bit more power to spin up and work properly than it did when new.

A 2.5" HDD by itself usually pulls 500mA or thereabouts anyway, never mind the bit of circutry that does the USB to PATA/SATA translation, and with is the current limit on most USB ports being 500mA (give or take a few mA), as you can imagine that's cutting it a bit fine.

Anyway, my theory is that when the drive gets to the point where it needs a bit more current (slightly more friction in the bearings that mount the platters is my guess), that's enough to knacker things up.

Had another one with this exact problem this morning. My mates Maxtor Maxtouch (or whatever they call 'em) with all his Uni work on it was giving the "click of death" whenever you tried to read or write any large files. He had tried it on numerous PCs and had even tried a few difference cables all to no avail. We prised the case apart, powered it up from a normal PC power supply and all was well, drive working happily and passed all diagnostics. Tried putting the drive in another SATA/USB enclosure, it all turned to shit again.

[coop]

Yeah its a pocket sized one mate powered by USB.

If its knackered (bad sectors are found) then i will just use it as a 20gig drive for the games.

[gaz75]

You could try a number of things for this problem, a double usb cable which is one for power and one for data, a low level format of the drive could be done which will identify the bad sectors and record them that they are unwritable, of course depends on how many bad sectors there are but worth a shot.

[coop]

Tried doing a 'low level' format and even tried creating paritions to try and bypass the bad sectors but what ever i try gets stuck pretty early in the process.

Looks like the drive is fooked.