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USB drive has ongoing problems, result is lost clusters.

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defaultabuser

Junior Member
I have a recurring problem bugging my usb drive, but which also has affected one of my hard drives, too(that one ended up dead). With the hard drive, the drive itself started failing so that was at least part of the reason.

With the usb drive, here is the problem.

I can use the drive just fine 90% of the time. But every now and then, it will lock up, like during a long copy/move operation, and everything freezes and I have to power off. I should note that I do use a usb hub so there's that. And the hub is not even directly connected to the laptop it's connected to the cooling pad. But my other usb drives are ok, afaik, and they use the same setup.

The problem usb pen drive is a patriot 8GB, fat32 formatted drive. I did recently notice the dreaded "found" folder on this drive, that tells me the drive has lost some clusters somewhere. Important question: How do I know which of those cluster files in that folder go with which source files? Because I may want to delete the comprimised files.

Anyway, if I boot up spinrite, it tells me something like "this drive's size doesn't match the size of the drive according to the bios(int13) extension". (as best I can remember)

If I boot up testdisk, and analyze that drive it tells me something like "bad sector relative?position" next screen tells me word for word:

Disk 83 - 8015MB / 7643 MiB - CHS 974 255 63

The harddisk (8015 MB / 7643 MiB) seems too small! (< 8015 MB / 7643 MiB) Check the harddisk size: HD jumper settings, BIOS detection...

The following partition can't be recovered:
Code: 
Partition        Start             End            Size in sectors
  FAT32         0  128  1     974 120 42      15646848(PATRIOT)








FAT32, 8011 MB / 7640 MiB
 
Jeepers. In the U.S., anyway, that flash drive is worth ten dollars. Throw it away and get another one. Why put up with the hassle?
 
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That will teach me to skim,

Thought you were talking about a USB HDD.


Yah unless there is valuable data needed on it.. Give it a toss.
 
Wow, maybe this forum has changed alot since the last time I was here(~3 years).

Those were very different answers than what I was expecting. Btw, Russwinters, if spinrite sees an error like that, it tells you point blank to go fix the problem and come back. In other words you are telling me not to do something that I never did. I never used spinrite on the drive, I just booted up spinrite to view the drive info. My guess is that you have never used spinrite and aren't familiar with what it does. Which is surprising to me, I had heard this forum is very tech-savvy.

Anyway, the second answer, to throw the drive away. Well I don't find that funny at all right now. I just spent a SOLID MONTH, that's right, an entire MONTH researching, preparing, and planning the correct way to fix my ailing hard drive. It didn't work. I have been using computers on and off since the days of commodore and I can tell you I've never been through such a painful, frustrating ordeal as this. I am so far behind right now I feel like giving up.

So yeah, I'm in a world of hurt right now, please be considerate if possible.

The patriot drive up there^ is a usb flash drive. I'm burnt out lately, I forgot to mention, sorry.

Basically, to re-state what's going on, and what I desperately need help to fix, is a few of my hdd's(I have like 6 hard disk drives) and one of my usb drives(which I cannot replace atm) has some minor problems with the drive geometry/partitions. In the case of my dead hard drive, the minor problem turned major so I want to fix all my drives 100&#37; to avoid another dead drive.

What's happening, is if I boot into dos and analyze the drives, whether I use test disk, spinrite,paragon, gparted.......or if I boot into windows and view with disk manager snap-in, they all tend to tell me different sizes/geometry for the drives. I can't tell you how frustrating and annoyed that makes me feel. Which program is telling me the truth? Because I feel like if I could just get an honest answer, then all I would have to do is correct the drive geometry and all this would be over with.

One option would be, since the patriot drive does work(I just backed up it's entire contents last night with ZERO problems or corruption) exactly like it's supposed to almost all the time, I could just ignore what testdisk says and hope for the best.

Help?
 
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Ok, So your problem is with a USB hard drive, or a Patriot series USB stick?


I know plenty about spinrite. I am a professional DR tech, and I make sure to be familiar with as many "Claimed DR softwares" as possible.

It is my professional opinion (and many other, head over to HDDguru and mention spinrite)
that Spinrite is a downright deathroll for your HDD if it is in a failure state.


What type of drive is this? Brand/Model?

Try MHDD and perform a scan as well.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
 
I guess I didn't understand your question, either. To me, you were saying you had an 8 GB Flash drive that was causing you a lot of headaches and was losing random data and, for some reason, you wanted to repair it rather than throw it away. The only drive mentioned was "a problem USB pen drive".

Guess I'm missing something.
 
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Yes, Rebate Monger that's mostly correct but but replace "losing random data" with "coming up dirty in test disk". And occasionally freezing, forcing me to power off. That usb flash drive, which is model# PSF8GDUSB, gets reported by more than one partition utility program, as having inconsistent drive geometry. For example test disk says "bad relative sector". I have already backed up the entire drive. And even though seeing a folder called "FOUND.001" with what looks to be missing pieces of files makes me very nervous, the drive hasn't actually lost or even corrupted any files afaik. I did a file for file backup of the whole drive, it went smoothly. The files appear to be fine.

What I'm trying to do, is get this drive, and all the rest of my drives to come up clean in test disk so I can trust them enough to start putting data back onto them. You were asking about a usb hard drive. I have never owned or used a usb hard drive in my entire life. I have 4 usb "pen" style flash drives. All 4GB except the patriot. I have 5 ordinary ide "pata" style hard drives. I hot swap them all the time, because they are mostly data storage. The largest drive is 80 gigs, that has my all my backups on it from my questionable drives. Once I can get them all good, I'll copy the files back over.

Anyway, google has been failing me hard for 3 solid days, but I finally hit the gold mine. (thank god)

I stumbled upon this wonderful thread, there tons of useful information, but this one by the user "nodsu" pretty much nails it-

"The "bad relative sector" message is because the end of your NTFS partition is marked beyond 32GB (which is the current size of the drive) and thus impossible."

Ok that is now confirmed. My patriot pen drive probably has a good start point, but a wrong end point for the partition boundary. So, I boot into ranish and I change the c/h/s so that the partition takes up the entire drive w/o going over the limits of the drive. Which are 974/255/63

so i set
start............end
0/1/1....973/254/63

and now ranish sees the boundaries are fixed! it does however complain about boot sector.

so, i boot into test disk, it tries and successfully fixes the boot sector.

Neither ranish nor test disk now find any errors besides not being a bootable drive(it's not supposed to be).

This is one of those rare cases where doing it manually from the beginning(with ranish) was the better choice. As opposed to windows disk manager(or maybe fdisk winME edition), which I think is what I used to originally format and/or partition the drive.

I'm checking all my other drives now, including the usb pen drives. I don't see any reason not to use ranish from now on to do the original fat32 partition and format. Is there?

And what about ntfs? I normally blank everything and let the win2000 boot disk do it. Should I use ranish for that too?
 
Ok, I am very sleep deprived but this is finally over. All my drives are working fine, and I found out some stuff. So I'll share what I found just for posterity.

First, this link has some decent info on this stuff.

Second, thing I found out. The reason standard partitioning programs don't offer what you would expect as far as working with usb flash drives is because usb flash drives are emulated, so they mimic real drives with c/h/s. The way they are implemented, has limitations.

Third thing I found out has to do with the drive utilities I was using.

What I found, is all the programs seem to agree on the heads and sector. Those numbers match no matter what.

Where they don't all agree, is the number of cylinders. From what I can tell, ranish and windows(using easeus) always give the correct geometry, and see the partition correctly. But test disk, gparted, and spinrite all come back with incorrect number of cylinders. And test disk sees problems where windows and ranish don't. Not only that, two different versions of test disk came back with different numbers and different errors of the same drive. Personally, I am losing faith in test disk. Why is it so paranoid with the errors?


Anyway, so glad this is over. I can keep my sanity, for now. Lol.
 
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