External Enclosure, HD, or something else going bad?

[Texun]

Here?s the deal? two external PATA drives in inside external enclosures of different brands on different computers, one Firewire and one USB 2.0 - partitioned and working fine for months on XP.

A couple of months ago the 2 partitions on the Maxtor with Firewire showed up unreadable. Poof! 200g?s of data gone. Used XP to format again and the drive tested fine. Moved several gigs of data over to test it out and it?s been fine since then.

Today, the 2 partitions on the WD with USB on the other PC 500 miles away did the same thing. Working fine for months and then today 200g?s of data were gone. As with the other, the partitions are there but unreadable. Formatted it again and the drive tests and works fine.

Has this happened to anyone else, and most importantly, and did anyone find the cause?

 

[Jiggz]

I've had this problem before and usually it happens if I keep unplugging the ext hdd, prior to shut down and then reboot with the ext hdd still unplugged. Upon plugging in the partition table becomes corrupted. Fortunately, I don't have to re-partition and reformat, instead I just do a repair using repair console. To prevent this corruption, make sure you always keep the hdd's plugged in before shutdown and also before start up.

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
I've had this problem before and usually it happens if I keep unplugging the ext hdd, prior to shut down and then reboot with the ext hdd still unplugged. Upon plugging in the partition table becomes corrupted. Fortunately, I don't have to re-partition and reformat, instead I just do a repair using repair console. To prevent this corruption, make sure you always keep the hdd's plugged in before shutdown and also before start up.

Sounds logical. The drive connected with Firewire is never unplugged, but I suppose a power drop or spike might do that by disconnecting it while the computer is running. Does this sound plausable?

I found out that the one on USB kept disconnecting and connecting before going "Tango Uniform" while the PC was running. Now it is beginning to make sense, but what the hell caused the disconnects? Could be power I guess.

Thanks for the tip! :beer:

 

[Texun]

One more question for Jiggz: What steps did you take in the Repair Console to fix it????

 

[Nocturnal]

Having them connected to a UPS is a good thing. That way you never lose power. Losing power or experiencing drops in voltage is dangerous to any hard drive, external or internal.