Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On 7/6/2011 11:17 AM, John Sessoms wrote: From: Godfrey DiGiorgi On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: Thanks for the feedback, Godders. The disk (a Western Digital 'My Book')... Say no more. I've had one of my own and three clients' WD My Book enclosures go bad all of a sudden. Mine was a 2T WD MyBook RAID enclosure. I pulled the two 1T drives out, put them into quality enclosures (Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro quad interface) after the WD enclosure died and have been running them for the past three years this way. Same for the clients' MyBooks. The drives are likely all right, it's the enclosure that sucks. Almost like Sigma lenses ... ]'-) I still have one of those MyBook RAIDs running. It's occasionally flakey. One of these days I'll get a Mercury Elite Pro RAID enclosure, move the drives over, and reformat, reload them from the other archive drive. Meanwhile, there's no risk of data loss as the enclosure is the second archive backup, not used for day-to-day work and mirrored from the first archive backup. Strangely the 1970 Buick LeSaber had the most over designed hack I've ever seen. The damned thing looked like it could raise a battle ship. The little scissors jack in most every other car looks less than puny by comparison. It may not be the enclosures. I think the power transformer is the more likely culprit. The ones WD includes with the MyBook are crap. There was an old joke going around when I was younger about American automobile manufacturers ... Q: Why does GM put a $2.00 jack in a $3,000 car? A: Because they ran out of $1.00 jacks. Fits WD MyBook wall warts to a T. $3,000 car? I did say it was an *OLD* joke. You can substitute whichever manufacturer you love to hate for GM; doesn't even have to be an American company. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1388 / Virus Database: 1516/3746 - Release Date: 07/05/11 -- Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom! --Marvin the Martian. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:39 -0700, Mark Cassino markcass...@ymail.com wrote: I had 5 of these 500 gb My Books drives and they generally worked well. One drive failed and took it to a local shop and they pulled the drive and put it in a generic enclosure - worked fine with no problems. The generic enclosure didn't cost more than $25 IIRC. So - you might want to just back up the flaky drive and have it put in a new enclosure. If it still has problems then the drive itself is flaky and you may as well just get rid of it or relegate it to just data transfers or something. Otherwise, like mine, it may work fine. I have since upgraded to a couple of 3TB drives and 2 of the 500 GB drives to have two copies of everything - and I drop off one set of thethe drives at a local computer shop that has their own data center every few months to archive everything remotely. The remaining My Books are not getting much use - they join the 200 gb drives etc that are big enough to be useful to too small to be valuable... Good luck- -- Thanks, Mark. I backed up the My Book a month or two back, so there's nothing there now that's unrecoverable. I'll try out the suggestions offered by you and others to see if the drive can be restored. In the meantime, I'll just use it for temporary storage. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ - Original Message From: John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com To: pdml@pdml.net Sent: Tue, July 5, 2011 8:56:56 PM Subject: RE: OT - Hard Disk Oddity From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love email again -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
RE: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
From: Brian Walters On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:56 -0400, John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com wrote: From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Is this perchance a Western Digital MyBook external drive? Perchance, it is. A My Book 500GB. What you're seeing may just be part of the nature of the WD MyBook, although I expect the power transformer (wall wart) is getting close to failure. I think all WD MyBooks have inadequate power transformers. I have two of the WD MyBooks (320GB 500GB) and both of them exhibit the same symptoms you describe. When you hook them up they appear dead, but if you leave them attached long enough they'll eventually show up. The 320GB got to the point where it would never start, until I inadvertently hooked it to the power supply for the other one and it started working again. I replaced that transformer and now they both work. Or at least work in the fashion of WD MyBooks. If you need it *right now*, you should have plugged it in half an hour ago. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1388 / Virus Database: 1516/3746 - Release Date: 07/05/11 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
From: Godfrey DiGiorgi On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: Thanks for the feedback, Godders. The disk (a Western Digital 'My Book')... Say no more. I've had one of my own and three clients' WD My Book enclosures go bad all of a sudden. Mine was a 2T WD MyBook RAID enclosure. I pulled the two 1T drives out, put them into quality enclosures (Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro quad interface) after the WD enclosure died and have been running them for the past three years this way. Same for the clients' MyBooks. The drives are likely all right, it's the enclosure that sucks. Almost like Sigma lenses ... ]'-) I still have one of those MyBook RAIDs running. It's occasionally flakey. One of these days I'll get a Mercury Elite Pro RAID enclosure, move the drives over, and reformat, reload them from the other archive drive. Meanwhile, there's no risk of data loss as the enclosure is the second archive backup, not used for day-to-day work and mirrored from the first archive backup. It may not be the enclosures. I think the power transformer is the more likely culprit. The ones WD includes with the MyBook are crap. There was an old joke going around when I was younger about American automobile manufacturers ... Q: Why does GM put a $2.00 jack in a $3,000 car? A: Because they ran out of $1.00 jacks. Fits WD MyBook wall warts to a T. $3,000 car? I did say it was an *OLD* joke. You can substitute whichever manufacturer you love to hate for GM; doesn't even have to be an American company. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1388 / Virus Database: 1516/3746 - Release Date: 07/05/11 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
Brian, while you are doing the other suggested things to try, make sure the firmware in your WD MyBook is up-to-date. Older MyBooks had a number of bizarre failure modes like quietly going offline and needing a power cycle to wake up. All symptoms fixed after the 2010 vintage firmware update. I have 4 WD MyBooks and all needed the firmware to work properly with my Macs. BTW, they are all fine now, no snooziness. (Quickly finds wood to touch ...) -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:30 -0400, Bruce Walker bruce.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Brian, while you are doing the other suggested things to try, make sure the firmware in your WD MyBook is up-to-date. Older MyBooks had a number of bizarre failure modes like quietly going offline and needing a power cycle to wake up. All symptoms fixed after the 2010 vintage firmware update. I have 4 WD MyBooks and all needed the firmware to work properly with my Macs. BTW, they are all fine now, no snooziness. (Quickly finds wood to touch ...) That's interesting. I never even considered a firmware upgrade. I'll check out the WD website. I'll also follow up John's suggestion re the power supply. WD seems to have problems with power supplies that aren't restricted to 'My Book'. I had a WD 'Essentials' drive (the one that died suddenly a few weeks back). I went through two powers supplies on that one, one of which was replaced under warranty. Checking on line I found that the problem was anything but uncommon. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
I had 5 of these 500 gb My Books drives and they generally worked well. One drive failed and took it to a local shop and they pulled the drive and put it in a generic enclosure - worked fine with no problems. The generic enclosure didn't cost more than $25 IIRC. So - you might want to just back up the flaky drive and have it put in a new enclosure. If it still has problems then the drive itself is flaky and you may as well just get rid of it or relegate it to just data transfers or something. Otherwise, like mine, it may work fine. I have since upgraded to a couple of 3TB drives and 2 of the 500 GB drives to have two copies of everything - and I drop off one set of thethe drives at a local computer shop that has their own data center every few months to archive everything remotely. The remaining My Books are not getting much use - they join the 200 gb drives etc that are big enough to be useful to too small to be valuable... Good luck- -- MCC - Original Message From: John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com To: pdml@pdml.net Sent: Tue, July 5, 2011 8:56:56 PM Subject: RE: OT - Hard Disk Oddity From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
I'm no Windows guru but similar things happen on Mac OS X systems. - Back up that disk to another volume. - run a file system and hardware check. I don't know what sw is available on Win to do this, but you should be able to find utilities inexpensively or free. - if the drive checks out, it might be a sign of a failing controller or enclosure interface. Swapping the drive to another known-good enclosure would demonstrate if the enclosure was failing. Use a known good cable of course... At three and a half years old, it's a little young yet to be close to failure by the averages, but why take chances? A two terabyte drive AND quality enclosure is barely two hundred dollars these days. I'd add a new one to the system, clone the data over, then erase and continue using the old one as a temp or work drive, keeping it backed up, until it fails. With a suitably comprehensive backup system, the risk of data loss is small. On Tuesday, July 5, 2011, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 16:09 -0700, Godfrey DiGiorgi gdigio...@gmail.com wrote: I'm no Windows guru but similar things happen on Mac OS X systems. - Back up that disk to another volume. - run a file system and hardware check. I don't know what sw is available on Win to do this, but you should be able to find utilities inexpensively or free. - if the drive checks out, it might be a sign of a failing controller or enclosure interface. Swapping the drive to another known-good enclosure would demonstrate if the enclosure was failing. Use a known good cable of course... At three and a half years old, it's a little young yet to be close to failure by the averages, but why take chances? A two terabyte drive AND quality enclosure is barely two hundred dollars these days. I'd add a new one to the system, clone the data over, then erase and continue using the old one as a temp or work drive, keeping it backed up, until it fails. With a suitably comprehensive backup system, the risk of data loss is small. Thanks for the feedback, Godders. The disk (a Western Digital 'My Book') has already been backed up to another - I went out and bought a 1.5 terabyte backup drive a few weeks ago when my other external drive (a Western Digital 'Essentials') died suddenly (that one was actually younger than the 'My Book' but my son installed it in a new enclosure and it seems to be OK so it was probably a faulty controller in that case). I originally bought the 'My Book' for my old PC which didn't have a large internal hard disk, so I was using the My Book drive as a second drive. I've since upgraded to a new PC with a large internal drive so I don't really need the external one any more. But, as you say, it could be useful as a temp or work drive so I'll double check the cable and then try it in a new enclosure. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ On Tuesday, July 5, 2011, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
RE: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Is this perchance a Western Digital MyBook external drive? - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1388 / Virus Database: 1516/3744 - Release Date: 07/04/11 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
RE: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:56 -0400, John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com wrote: From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Is this perchance a Western Digital MyBook external drive? Perchance, it is. A My Book 500GB. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
I have a 1TB that does the same thing. It will randomly drop off and reconnect. I got it second hand and am only using it as a dump area, so nothing critical for me goes on it. On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:56 -0400, John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com wrote: From: Brian Walters G'day all For several months one of my external hard drives has been acting a bit 'flaky'. The drive is permanently attached to the PC but when the computer boots there is no sign of the drive in Windows Explorer. However, after about 10-15 minutes, the autoplay window magically appears and the operating system reads the drive, which then becomes available. The drive continues to work properly thereafter - until the next boot when the process starts over again. My question is whether the hard disk itself is on the way to hard disk hell or whether the drive controller is likely to be the culprit. Or could it be a faulty USB cable? Would it be worth extracting the drive from its case and try installing it in a new case? The drive is about three and a half years old. Note that I'm not relying on this drive as a primary back up any more, but it is convenient if it keeps working. And I'm just curious as to why the drive would be behaving like this. Is this perchance a Western Digital MyBook external drive? Perchance, it is. A My Book 500GB. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- David Parsons Photography http://www.davidparsonsphoto.com Aloha Photographer Photoblog http://alohaphotog.blogspot.com/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Brian Walters supera1...@fastmail.fm wrote: Thanks for the feedback, Godders. The disk (a Western Digital 'My Book')... Say no more. I've had one of my own and three clients' WD My Book enclosures go bad all of a sudden. Mine was a 2T WD MyBook RAID enclosure. I pulled the two 1T drives out, put them into quality enclosures (Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro quad interface) after the WD enclosure died and have been running them for the past three years this way. Same for the clients' MyBooks. The drives are likely all right, it's the enclosure that sucks. Almost like Sigma lenses ... ]'-) I still have one of those MyBook RAIDs running. It's occasionally flakey. One of these days I'll get a Mercury Elite Pro RAID enclosure, move the drives over, and reformat, reload them from the other archive drive. Meanwhile, there's no risk of data loss as the enclosure is the second archive backup, not used for day-to-day work and mirrored from the first archive backup. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On 2011-07-05 19:55 , Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: [...] I pulled the two 1T drives out, put them into quality enclosures (Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro quad interface) after the WD enclosure died and have been running them for the past three years this way. Same for the clients' MyBooks. The drives are likely all right, it's the enclosure that sucks. Almost like Sigma lenses ... ]'-) often enough with such things it's the power supply that goes bad; i have had a power supply go bad with an Other World Computing two-drive RAID case as well; it was easy enough to replace the power supply (maybe it could be done with Brian's WD drive?) and OWC admitted they'd had a batch of power supplies that were unreliable but still made me pay for the replacement; the same RAID case also has a flaky fan that needs help to get going on the few occasions i power it down -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Hard Disk Oddity
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 7:43 PM, steve harley p...@paper-ape.com wrote: often enough with such things it's the power supply that goes bad; i have had a power supply go bad with an Other World Computing two-drive RAID case as well; it was easy enough to replace the power supply (maybe it could be done with Brian's WD drive?) and OWC admitted they'd had a batch of power supplies that were unreliable but still made me pay for the replacement; the same RAID case also has a flaky fan that needs help to get going on the few occasions i power it down Agree ... nothing's perfect. I've (knock on wood) had no problems with the OWC enclosures to date, and neither have my clients. But I do keep a spare enclosure just in case. The WDs I've had and seen that failed weren't power supply failures ... they were firmware failures. The RAID's firmware code just bricked it, and the others the interface died. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
