wd 500Gig USB problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hugh Sutherland
  • Start date Start date
H

Hugh Sutherland

I have a WD 500G HD and when connected to the IDE works great. I have
movies on it about 300G full. The problem is when I try to attach it to an
external USB case then plug that into the usb port the drive takes forever
to come up and be detected and when it does will not display my data. It
shows as a RAW drive with 0gigs used. Under disk management in
Administrative tools it shows as health but will not show as NTFS. Its
blank their. I don't want to format it again. Any ideas?
 
Hugh said:
I have a WD 500G HD and when connected to the IDE works great. I have
movies on it about 300G full. The problem is when I try to attach it
to an external USB case then plug that into the usb port the drive
takes forever to come up and be detected and when it does will not
display my data. It shows as a RAW drive with 0gigs used. Under disk
management in Administrative tools it shows as health but will not
show as NTFS. Its blank their. I don't want to format it again. Any
ideas?
Click to expand...

Check the jumpers on the hard drive. Some external enclosures work properly
only when the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper is not set to Master.
 
I have a WD 500G HD and when connected to the IDE works great. I have
movies on it about 300G full. The problem is when I try to attach it to an
external USB case then plug that into the usb port the drive takes forever
to come up and be detected and when it does will not display my data. It
shows as a RAW drive with 0gigs used. Under disk management in
Administrative tools it shows as health but will not show as NTFS. Its
blank their. I don't want to format it again. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Check if your external enclosure supports NTFS.
From what you write, it seems to support FAT / FAT32 only.

(Easy solution: buy an enclosure that does support NTFS.)
 
The external housing might not support a 500 GB drive, e.g. mine supports up to only 320 GB.
 
Hugh said:
I have a WD 500G HD and when connected to the IDE works great. I have
movies on it about 300G full. The problem is when I try to attach it to an
external USB case then plug that into the usb port the drive takes forever
to come up and be detected and when it does will not display my data. It
shows as a RAW drive with 0gigs used. Under disk management in
Administrative tools it shows as health but will not show as NTFS. Its
blank their. I don't want to format it again. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

An interesting experiment might be to run HDTune on it
(after verifying the jumper settings on the drive).

(Version 2.55 is free and runs a read-only test)
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

If the problem was with "supporting" 500GB, then you'd expect
HDTune to get tied in knots, when running the benchmark. Does
the benchmark test run all the way across the disk surface ?

HDTune works at the physical level, so is independent of the
file system type used on the partitions. For example, HDTune
can do reads across the surface of my disk which has two Windows
partitions and two Linux (EXT2) partitions.

If the interface is USB2, and the enclosure has decent performance,
the resulting benchmark curve should be a flat line at about 30MB/sec.
That is about all that USB2 can manage, due to the protocols used. In
USB 1.1 mode, you'd see a flat line with a little more than 1MB/sec
offered. Connection via IDE ribbon cable, should offer better performance
(and a downward sloped curve, rather than a flat line benchmark).

Paul
 
I tried changing the jumpers from CS to MSTR to SLAVE etc the only
difference is sometime in device manager it comes up as GERNERIC VOID USB
DEVICE and sometimes as GENERIC USB DISK USB DEVICE. Either way it shows up
as RAW with nothing on it (when it does show up in MY COMPUTER) and I know
their is data on it.

Why would the EXT closure not support NTFS since FAT32 only goes no highter
then 32GIG. TODAYS HD's are all NTFS so todays USB enclosures should
support NTFS.

Why would the external usb housing only support up to 320GIG and not higher?

HDTune didn't work since it won't see the usb drive and when I try it
crashes
 
Hugh said:
I tried changing the jumpers from CS to MSTR to SLAVE etc the only
difference is sometime in device manager it comes up as GERNERIC VOID USB
DEVICE and sometimes as GENERIC USB DISK USB DEVICE. Either way it shows up
as RAW with nothing on it (when it does show up in MY COMPUTER) and I know
their is data on it.

Why would the EXT closure not support NTFS since FAT32 only goes no highter
then 32GIG. TODAYS HD's are all NTFS so todays USB enclosures should
support NTFS.

Why would the external usb housing only support up to 320GIG and not higher?

HDTune didn't work since it won't see the usb drive and when I try it
crashes
Click to expand...

I just plugged in a USB flash drive, and HDTune is benchmarking it for me.
It reads a flat line, at 29MB/sec. No crash.

I put an 80GB IDE drive (Seagate) into a USB2 enclosure (Startech), and
that benches as well, without crashing. It measures at about 27MB/sec
and a flat line (with more variation in the performance than the
flash drive shows).

So your experience is different than mine. A crash suggests some operation
failed.

As for capacity limits, there is no logical explanation for why
some USB drive enclosures have limits. In terms of the ATA/ATAPI
spec, the last barrier currently of interest, is the changeover
to 48bit LBA. And that should be at 137GB. The next limit, in
environments like Windows, is at 2.2TB, due to 32 bit sector
numbers or thereabouts. So why an IDE to USB adapter chip, should
have a problem at 320GB, 500GB, or 1TB, is a mystery to me at
least. But there are some controllers showing problems. I
don't own any big disks here, so cannot try any test cases.
250GB is the largest disk I currently own. My collection
spans 4GB, 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 120GB, with the recent
acquisition of a couple 250GB SATA drives. No 1TB
drives yet.

With respect to NTFS versus FAT32, the enclosure doesn't care.
The enclosure is responsible for supporting READ(), WRITE(), and
some set of raw device info commands. File systems are something
above the physical protocol layer. All your enclosure knows, is
"SEEK to sector 1234567", it neither knows nor cares that the
thing at 1234567 is an element of a file system.

I'd probably use something like TestDisk, to scan and see if the
remnants of a file system are present. If the data is really
valuable, then there is also the option of one of the many
"$39.95 data recovery" software packages. I don't know how you
go about selecting those, to get your money's worth. Some
offer to scan first, and tell you how many files they've found,
before you pay for the product and actually gain access to your
files.

( Hint: If you want to quit at some menu level, press <control>-C. )
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Something else you might experiment with, is connecting some
other USB enclosure and separate disk, on the off chance that
the USB protocol stack is corrupted. Examples of stuff you
can screw around with, with regard to protocol stack, are here.

"XP asks for drivers"

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html

"Cleanup Windows Device Manager in SAFE MODE"

http://www.usbman.com/Guides/Cleanup Device Manager Safe Mode.htm

An automated way of doing that last one, is "renewUSB.bat" here,
which uses DevCon. I haven't had the guts to try this :-)
I'd want to disconnect the USB devices before trying.

"Remove all USB devices and then rescan for new ones"

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/devcon.php

Windows has some caches of system files, and if
enough copies are corrupted, it may not be possible
to get a clean protocol stack again for USB. In that
case, I might try a repair install (as long as no
malware is suspected). A repair install leaves
program installations intact, but refreshes system
files. It requires a visit to Windows Update, for
hours of security patches and Service Pack installations,
and a CD with slipstreamed Service Pack is recommended
to reduce the amount of downloading needed. (I.e. Download
SP3, and slipstream it using your original installer CD.
Keep it for a rainy day.)

Nlite and Autostreamer are examples of automated tools
for slipstreaming. I'm not sure whether Autostreamer
is still supported.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nlite

HTH,
Paul
 
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