External hard drive crashes explorer

[KevlarCoated]

I have a strange problem. I have a external hard drive (seagate freeagent go) and when trying to copy files or watch videos on the drive it will copy about 2/3 of the file then just stop, explorer just freezes up and wont work properly until the hdd is disconnected. Similar thing happens with VLC it will play to a random point in the file and just stop, you can close VLC but the VLC process remains running for about 5 minutes and cant be force closed.
Same thing happens with multiple different files.
I ran a check disk on it it came back fine.
The drive shows up in computer management when first plugged in but if it has stopped work disk management cant connect to the disk manager until the hdd has been disconnected.
If anyone has any suggestions to fix this they would be greatly appreciated.

Windows 7 x64 (also had similar problems on vista with the same drive)

 

[IGemini]

I had a similar problem on my motherboard with eSATA connections...though you didn't mention which connection you use. Also what board model is yours?

 

[KevlarCoated]

Using USB connection on my laptop (Asus G51J) the drive doesnt have esata, I could try swapping it into one of my other enclosures to see if that works.
Also I tried it on a xp machine and got a CRC error but also noted that some files work (randomly picking files to copy and some worked others exhibited the same behavior noted above)

 

[IGemini]

Interesting. I bought it up because I got the exact same problem on my eSATA drive on my P5Q Deluxe motherboard. Workaround was using the native Windows 7 eSATA driver and not the Marvell.

But it seems that Microsoft has a KB article on this issue that looks relevant:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976972

 

[KevlarCoated]

Thanks for the link, I installed the update but it hasnt made a difference, Im thinking its probably related to the hard drive rather than my laptop as it was working fine before and now it exhibits the same problem on all 3 machines I have tested it on, all running different OSs and different hardware.

I have just tried using Ontrack Easy Recovery profession to recover some of the files and it just stops mid way through the file recovery.

 

[Gunbuster]

Did you run the Seagate drive diag utility?

 

[gsaldivar]

Check event viewer, try replacing external cable, reinstall driver, still under warranty? RMA if possible...

 

[KevlarCoated]

Thanks for the advice guys, looks like the drive is buggered. Seagate diagnostic tool said so. Under self test it failed, under long generic test it got to about 230 errors then failed.
Event Viewer gives me hundreds of these errors
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR9 during a paging operation.

Time for a new hard drive I suppose