Is my external screwed?

Okay so my lacie external hard drive is only about 6 months old. Now whenever I will access the drive, windows explorer will take a while to show everything in the drive. For example only a few folders will appear and it will be really slow in everything showing up. The little green progress bar that shows up on the address bar is slow and windows explorer will freeze up and will immediately return to normal once i turn off the drive. I can't even open HDtune while the drive is connected to my computer to find out the health problems. HDTune wont open unless the drive is off or disconnected. I changed the usb cord and nothing has changed, so i guess its a drive problem? If i unplug the drive while its on and plug it back in, my computer will not detect it. The drive wont spin or anything at all either. I have to turn it off and turn it back on for it to be detected. Is it time to send a warranty ticket?

 

Warranty should be your last resort. My initial suggestion would be to try accessing the drive via a Linux installation or LiveCD. If you can back up files off of the external, then do so. Once you have/If you can't, try zeroing/low-level formatting the drive. You'll need to reformat it once it has been wiped. If you can then access the drive normally, check the SMART data (if available) and see if any failure warnings appear. If you have a number of bad sectors that are above the recommended limit, then you'll probably want to set up a warranty ticket.

Or if you're fairly confident that the above steps won't help, then just jump straight to the ticket.

 

Well, i don't know why the SMART data is not showing up. On HDTune, i turn it on and then plug in the drive, it detects it, but it no longer shows the temps or SMART data. Same with Active hard disk monitor, it shows that the SMART data is unavailable.

 

Hi! I'm a doof. Even though I referred to the drive as an external, I was thinking of it as an internal. SMART data can rarely be read over USB or Firewire. Not sure about eSATA; haven't had a drive to test it on yet. So that's entirely expected that you would be unable to pull SMART data off of the drive. Is it one that can be easily removed from its case and hooked up to your computer via SATA (assuming that you have a desktop)?

 

That's weird though, because in the past HDTune was showing all the SMART data and temps. I remember it had 2 "ultra dma cmc errors" or something like that, which pretty much means theres a problem with the cord. But now nothing shows up?

 

Like I said, my experience has been that externals are extremely finicky when it comes to SMART data. Or rather, the reading of that data. Have you tried wiping the drive yet to see if that will allow you to read it? Or accessing it with a LiveCD?

 

I can't wipe the drive because I will lose too much data which I can't back up anywhere else.

 

Ok, so what about the LiveCD? Were you able to read it using, say, Ubuntu's LiveCD?

 

Easiest way to check whether the drive is OK:
Take it out - find a desktop and try it in there.
More than one enclosure failed on me in the past.

 

If it's under warranty, then it probably has a tamper proof sticker on it. If he opens it under warranty, then he loses the warranty.

It's possible that the controller on the external is going bad. I have a Cavalry 1TB external. The eSata on it is flaky and sometimes causes a timeout, which results in Windows Explorer freezing. However, the USB 2.0 works perfectly.

If you need to send the external in for warranty, more than likely you'll have to pay for shipping it. You're looking at about $10 to ship it. Might as well spend an extra $10, for a total of $20, and get an external enclosure. Take the hard drive out and stick it in the new enclosure and test. If it works, great! If it doesn't return the enclosure. Otherwise keep it just in case.

 

This is why I'd suggest a LiveCD. I've managed to pull tons of data even off of drives that were failing without having to resort to TestDisk or PhotoRec.