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Disapearing sub-directories on Western Digital MyBook Essential 250 GB
Hi!
It can also happen with substandard cables. I had one. Problems with an USB hub or the USB chipset in the computer may also cause it. Check your cabling and replace it if you have any question. USB cables are not terribly expensive, though they do cost more than I'd like them to. Also check your drivers to be sure they are the latest release and working properly. If you feel adventurous (though this will at least theoretically void the warranty) pull the drive and run WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on it (warning: may destroy data!) or invest in a copy of SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation and use that to test the drive. (Kind of spendy, but generally safe for your data. I've had pretty good results in weeding out flakey drives and "rescuing" information from dying ones with it.) It really sounds to me like your USB bus is cutting out for some reason. If the cables, drivers and USB hardware seem to be good, make sure the drive is plugged directly into the computer or use another USB port. Some devices work better on certain ports than they do others. The way to fix this is probably to disable delayed writes. If I remember correctly they should not be enabled on removable media in the first place. I don't remember were to explicitely disable them though. Right click My Computer Properties Hardware (Win2000/XP only) Device Manager (button on Win2k/XP, tab on all others) and expand the hard drive category. From there you can double click on the drive, select the Properties tab and find the write cache option checkbox. Every USB drive I've seen so far has the checkbox cleared and greyed out, probably because of the fact that the drive could suddenly disappear from the system. While you're at it, save yourself some potential grief (such as that caused by a sudden power failure or computer crash) and deselect the "Enable Write Cache" checkbox for your internal hard drives. Windows doesn't always do real well with committing write-cached data to disk if something goes wrong, especially with Windows 2000 and XP. (Windows Server 2003 seems to do a lot better.) William -- Brought to you by an IBM PS/2 Server 95 9595-1NT (with Y complex), S/N 23KK821 Pentium 90, Windows NT 4.0, 128MB RAM ....and the power supply hasn't failed yet! |
#12
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Disapearing sub-directories on Western Digital MyBook Essential 250 GB
Alexander Grigoriev wrote
Arno Wagner wrote Alexander Grigoriev wrote 1) NTFS is not supported for removeable devices. Wrong. It might work, but you're on your own. Wrong. Aha, there is the problem. Nope. I suppose NTFS routinely runs with write-buffering? Nope. I suspect FAT driver adjusts its caching behavior for removable disks. More fool you. NTFS does not care about those. But in any case, NTFS metadata is not write-buffered. |
#13
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Disapearing sub-directories on Western Digital MyBook Essential 250 GB
Alexander Grigoriev wrote
It's not like it's not supposed to work. It just doesn't take into account some considerations required to avoid data loss when a device gets removed. Wrong, as always. wrote in message ... On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:11:28 +1000, "Rod Speed" wrote: Alexander Grigoriev wrote: 1) NTFS is not supported for removeable devices. NTFS works fine on a 120 GB WD ext drive and has for months. Regards, Ralph |
#14
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Disapearing sub-directories on Western Digital MyBook Essential 250 GB
On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:33:44 -0400, Daniel G.
wrote: Hi, I'm having trouble w/my new WD MyBook Essential 250. After I bought it approx. 3 weeks ago I created 2 NTFS partitions. On one of the partitions I created 2 folders, "video" & "Audio". two nights ago I'd started to download 3 torrents from Dimeadozen.org. For 2 of the torrents I created separate sub folders under the "video" folder and another sub folder for the third torrent under the "audio" Folder. I saw in each sub directory the files in the torrents had been created and data was being downloaded. I left my PC on all night so I could finish downloading all 3 torrents. When I checked my PC the morning after there was an error message on all 3 Bittorrent clients saying the directory name was invalid. When I opened the Audio & Video folders they were empty, none of the sub directories I'd created were there nor any of the torrent data. Also, 2 backup files on the other partition were gone as well. They weren't in the recycle bin or anywhere else. I tried swapping the USB cable and that seemed to be the fix. I've tried a few times to recreate the problems I was having and everything worked fine. It's been over a week w/no problems. I've still got to check the old cable again but this time ensuring the connections are good, forgot to do that prior to swapping (duh!), also want to be sure it is the cable that's the problem and not something else. Thanks for your replies!! |
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