External Hard Drive Not Responding

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Michael Paulmeno

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Aug 30, 2013
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For the last several months I have had a persistent problem with an external hard drive attached to my home computer. It typically works fine when I try to access it, although sometimes that takes a minute. On rare occasions it has been necessary to unplug the device and plug it back in due to files not loading. In other words I click on the drive, the green loading bar appears at the top of the screen, but never reaches the end and no folders show up.

The real issue is that my system backups and weekly virus scans are failing on a regular basis because the hard drive cannot be read. This does not happen every week, but is becoming irritating. Today my system backup only got to 25% and then froze; a similar thing happened with my anti-virus full system scan. Has anyone encountered similar issues? Here are my specs:

Seagate 1.5 TB external hard drive; bought about a year ago and less than 1/3 full
Windows 8 32-bit OS
Avast Anti-Virus software
Windows 8 backup utility (I'd used Seagate's software, but stopped months ago)
6 GB RAM
Dual core AMD Athlon II X2 processor (can't remember exact speed at the moment)
 
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Michael Paulmeno

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Aug 30, 2013
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Check disk returned nothing, but the event viewer did reveal some clues. That drive has had nearly 20,000 errors with event ID 140 since July 1st. There are also more then 30,000 errors with event ID 153 in the same time period, but they refer to "disk 1" which might not be the external hard drive.
 
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jbseven

jbseven

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Dec 2, 2011
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Do a start search for 'computer management', and go to 'disk management' on the left. Here the drive letter assigned to 'disk 1' may be the offending drive.

Do a check disk on both drives, making sure to check the 'search for bad sectors' box. This will take a considerable amount of time.
 
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Michael Paulmeno

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Aug 30, 2013
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I ran check disk through the command line with parameters /f /x and /r . The external hard drive is fine and no errors or bad sectors were found. The same is true of my main hard drive although check disk worked differently with that one possibly since it is a bootable drive. It would only run upon restart and took perhaps 30 seconds. However that is disk 0. Disk 1 probably referred to a third hard drive that was in my computer until recently. It is a ten year old 160 GB IDE model that came with my PC. It was the only hard drive until I got another one and demoted it to tertiary status. Check disk found 1 bad cluster and several bad sectors. That accounts for some of the error messages, but not the rest. Tomorrow is scan and backup day so it will be interesting to see if the hard drive in question has any problems.
 
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Michael Paulmeno

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Aug 30, 2013
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Last night I realized that the hard drive has software to go along with it (the SeaGate Dashboard). After updating it to be compatible with Windows 8, I discovered that the hard drive is set to go into power save mode after 15 minutes. I turned that off and now it seems to be running fine.
 
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