External hard drive paging operation error

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shawn E. Hale
  • Start date Start date
S

Shawn E. Hale

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 320GB USB external drive and
plugged it into my desktop computer (Gateway running XP Pro). The drive was
recognized immediately and I copied files to it with no problems. While
reviewing my Event Viewer, I found the following (truncated) entry - which
was repeated about on an hourly basis when the computer was idle:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 51
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging
operation.

I tried plugging it into different USB ports, running chkdsk /r and /f,
Seagate utilities, reformatting it, etc. and the same error occurred. No
errors were detected in the tests and I would not have known about the error
message if I didn't happen to see it in the Event Viewer. I got the same
message when the Seagate was plugged into another laptop and my work laptop.
Google results and MS Knowledge Base indicate that this error can be ignored
and "no user action is required" if this error occurs on non-primary drives.
I brought that drive back and exchanged it for another one with the same
errors. I have other, older external USB drives that I use (Iomega 80 GB
and Western Digital 250 GB) but these drives do not generate the paging
errors when hooked to my desktop or laptop computers. Despite the
directions to ignore the error message, I don't feel comfortable with an
Event Viewer log full of disk error messages. Am I over-reacting? Am I
wasting my time looking for another external hard drive or do all newer
external drives generate that error? Thanks for any advice.
 
Shawn said:
I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 320GB USB external drive and
plugged it into my desktop computer (Gateway running XP Pro). The drive was
recognized immediately and I copied files to it with no problems. While
reviewing my Event Viewer, I found the following (truncated) entry - which
was repeated about on an hourly basis when the computer was idle:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 51
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging
operation.

I tried plugging it into different USB ports, running chkdsk /r and /f,
Seagate utilities, reformatting it, etc. and the same error occurred. No
errors were detected in the tests and I would not have known about the error
message if I didn't happen to see it in the Event Viewer. I got the same
message when the Seagate was plugged into another laptop and my work laptop.
Google results and MS Knowledge Base indicate that this error can be ignored
and "no user action is required" if this error occurs on non-primary drives.
I brought that drive back and exchanged it for another one with the same
errors. I have other, older external USB drives that I use (Iomega 80 GB
and Western Digital 250 GB) but these drives do not generate the paging
errors when hooked to my desktop or laptop computers. Despite the
directions to ignore the error message, I don't feel comfortable with an
Event Viewer log full of disk error messages. Am I over-reacting? Am I
wasting my time looking for another external hard drive or do all newer
external drives generate that error? Thanks for any advice.
Click to expand...

Perhaps not significant. However, how is this external HD partitioned?
FAT32 or NTFS?
 
It came NTFS (same as the others although those I had converted from FAT32).
I reformatted it to try to fix the issue (NTFS again) but that didn't help.
What gets me is that I have other external drives that don't cause this
problem.
 
Shawn said:
It came NTFS (same as the others although those I had converted from FAT32).
I reformatted it to try to fix the issue (NTFS again) but that didn't help.
What gets me is that I have other external drives that don't cause this
problem.
Click to expand...

Is the caching enabled on one of the external drives but not the other?
 
Nope. I checked the properties on them all and they were identical. The
drives are/were (including the Seagate) optimized for "quick removal."
Thanks for the continued feedback.
 
I found this information from the Seagate knowledge base
(http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/knowledge_base/):

A paging operation is defined as anytime the operating system writes or
reads data from memory to drive, or reads from the hard drive and writes to
memory. These errors are not caused by the external storage device. The
error may be related to problems in either the USB / ATA / SCSI / 1394
controller sub system or another storage device.

Seagate seems to acknowledge the issue but I don't get those errors from my
Western Digital or Iomega drives. Maybe it is a Seagate thing. Next time I
see a similar sale for a different brand external HDD, I will buy and try it
and post back the results.
 
I wound up buying a 400 GB Western Digital external HDD. Plugged it in. It
has been running error free for 24 hours.
 
If you see this error with your FreeAgent external drive, it's most likely caused by the drive going to sleep mode. Disable sleep with the FreeAgent tools. That should make the error disappear. It worked for me.

EggHeadCafe - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
 
If you see this error with your FreeAgent external drive, it's most likely caused by the drive going to sleep mode. Disable sleep with the FreeAgent tools. That should make the error disappear. It worked for me.

EggHeadCafe - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
 
If you see this error with your FreeAgent external drive, it's most likely
caused by the drive going to sleep mode. Disable sleep with the FreeAgent
tools. That should make the error disappear. It worked for me.

EggHeadCafe - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
Click to expand...

What problem are you solving?
 
If you see this error with your FreeAgent external drive, it's most likely
caused by the drive going to sleep mode. Disable sleep with the FreeAgent
tools. That should make the error disappear. It worked for me.

EggHeadCafe - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
Click to expand...


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