External hard drive problem

[Harsky]

I bought a Freeagent to store my games and a couple of my programs. One day, I decided to reinstall Photoshop from the external HDD but it gave me an error. Not a problem since I thought I could download it again but then when I tried to reinstall other programs like Office, it keeps giving errors. In fact, one day, I copied Autocad into the HDD but even though it installed perfectly on my normal HDD, when I tried to reinstall it from my Freeagent, it kept giving errors.

I shudder to think that every program I have on it is corrupted which is why I'm thankful for blank DVDs but what could be the problem causing this?

 

[Alerek]

I had a similar issue on an older box I had, was trying to use a USB 2.0 device with an old usb port, gave a bunch of weird errors as opposed to the "This is not a 2.0 compatible device."

that may be it?

 

[Harsky]

I had a similar issue on an older box I had, was trying to use a USB 2.0 device with an old usb port, gave a bunch of weird errors as opposed to the "This is not a 2.0 compatible device."

that may be it?

No. That's not it.

 

[fischju]

Find a large rar file, and use winrar to test it for corruption

 

[methodone]

Unfortunately it usually takes a dead drive with tons of lost data for most people to start using RAID & backups for important data. I know I learned the hard way. Now all my disks with anything slightly important are raid-5 or raid-1.

 

[fischju]

Unfortunately it usually takes a dead drive with tons of lost data for most people to start using RAID & backups for important data. I know I learned the hard way. Now all my disks with anything slightly important are raid-5 or raid-1.

I just back up almost everything on high quality DVDs


Run chkdsk x: /f

(x: being the drive)

 

[FAST6191]

Unfortunately it usually takes a dead drive with tons of lost data for most people to start using RAID & backups for important data. I know I learned the hard way. Now all my disks with anything slightly important are raid-5 or raid-1.

Be careful when saying that as raid0 is probably the most common one I see people do.


Back on topic.
Cables: the USB cables most drives come with do not take kindly to any form of abuse (I have lost count of how many I have resoldered now) so try some others.

Drive: I am with everyone else on the corruption one. Checkdisc, spinrite (maybe a spell in the freezer too) and the rest may help. Also you might consider an external reader not as part of the external drive.

 

[Harsky]

I just took an ISO which I associated it with Winrar and unpacked it into a folder. No problem. I was really worried that it stemmed from last year when I was in the middle of transfering an ISO and I accident knocked it over and the cable came out. Obviously the ISO got corrupted which didn't bother me since I had another copy but could something like this have a knockon effect with the other files? Also, I noticed the problem seems to stem if I tried to install from the Freeagent that it gives me several messages about some components etc not being installed. Copying TO my PC desktop didn't help as well.

Suppose I'm glad I got DVD-r to fall back on and not to mention that the ISOs I burn to disc from it seems to be fine. Learnt to NOT use it to store PC apps this time.

 

[Harsky]

Bumping because I just discovered that a 200mb game I decided to transfer into my computer has one file that is corrupted when I tried to unpack it with winrar thus rendering it unplayable with no choice but for me to redownload it. This makes me wonder how many other games packed in winrar (or in fact games packed in other compression software) seem to be corrupted. Is there such a program that can check?

 

[leetdude_007]

as for the rar file, see if you can repair it.

 

[Harsky]

as for the rar file, see if you can repair it.

Doesn't seem to be working... ack... it seems as if the problems extends to some of the DS roms as well as this one shows

G:\NDS ROMS\NDS Roms 1501-1520\1514 - NDS The Legend Of Zelda Phantom Hourglass (EUR).zip: CRC failed in [NDS]The Legend Of Zelda Phantom Hourglass [EUR]\The Legend Of Zelda Phantom Hourglass.nds. The file is corrupt

And no amount of repairing can help. I am just so SO thankful that I backed a lot of the stuff to DVD-R and the only thing I wasted was several hours moving the files. Very annoying and I just can't understand how the second I move a winrar file and take it out, it corrupts it.