Testing Removal Hard Drive

I recently purchased a removable hard drive. LaCie 500 MB USB Attach

Lately I've been having problems. When I first received the unit (it worked fine) I noticed that when I shut down my PC, the unit (USB attached) would flash every minute or so. Strange (to me) but didn't seem to effect anything, so I just let it pass.

Now it stays lighted all the time and occasionally I get an error message from Win XP that there is an USB device attached that it can't identify. Since I have more that one device attached via USB, I can't be sure it's the drive.

Anyway, so far I haven't experienced any read errors with the drive, but just in case I have copied the drive contents to another drive. 500 MB. Used my new Win7 machine. Took four hours. rolleyes

Is there any way to test the drive to see if it is having problems other than run DskChk?

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

When you remove the drive and reboot do you still get the "USB device it can't identify" message. Let it run a while to be sure.

Do you have the latest desktop manager and drivers?
https://www.lacie.com/support/drivers/index.htm?id=10007

 

The fact that the unit's LED would flash every minute or so and now just stays on (is it brighter than usual?) indicates the controller circuitry on the hard drive's board may be failing. That's exactly what happened with a WD drive I had although, like you, I was able to get my data off of it.

 

Run SeaTools http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/202435en

 

mdonah - Thanks. Exactly the problem. Checked the drive with Seagate Tools (as plodr suggested) and the drive is fine. Moved it from PC#1 to PC#3 and when I powered down, the light went out and stayed out as one would expect. PC#1 is over 10 years old. I guess it's time for a complete over-haul and a O/S change from XP to Win7.

DOA - I think that "problem" was a loose USB connection from one of the hard drives. Did a chdsk and got a report that some of the indexes were messed up and needed to be corrected. I may have lost some data, but there is nothing on that drive that's important or at least recoverable.

Thanks to all.