Hard drives Randomly Disconnecting and I/0 Errors

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keanedeco115

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Jan 10, 2018
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Hi I have a Dell XPS L502x laptop running windows 10. I recently decided to do a clean install. I have a number of external hard drives with movies/photos on them. When watching a movie I after a while it freezes. When i go to windows explorer I sometimes get an I/0 error when trying access certain folders. If i wait a little longer the hard drive disappears from my computer completely. If i remove the hard drive and plug it in again it functions normally again and I can access all the folders again.

Any other day I would just put this down to a failing hard drive but I have noticed it happening on at least 2 of my drives and that leads me to believe it is a computer problem.

Any suggestions?
 
Solution
K
I figured it out, it was a driver issue. I uninstalled all USB and Chipset drivers and installed the ones meant for my laptop on the Dell Support page. When i reinstalled windows all the chipset drivers were Generic ones so i needed to install the proper ones for it to work. Hard drives running fine now. Thanks for all the help!
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JaredDM

JaredDM

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Jul 8, 2015
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Replace SATA cables, try plugging into different SATA ports on motherboard, check SMART of HDDs using a tool like CrystalDiskInfo to see if they are developing bad sectors. If all that checks out and the problem is still happening, it's probably a faulty controller on the motherboard.

Edit: I just realized you said it's a laptop. So disregard my previous message. Try different USB cables, try the externals on another computer and see if it happens there. Also, still check SMART of the drives, they might be failing (especially if they are Seagates which are dropping like flies).
 
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keanedeco115

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Jan 10, 2018
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Hi Jared, thanks for the reply. I've tried the different cables to no avail. This evening I tried plugging the hard drives into another laptop and scanning them with Seatools longest scan which takes about 4-5 hours and always fails on the XPS because the hard drive disconnects at some random point during the test. When I tried this test on the other laptop it worked fine the whole way through. CrystalInfo and Seagates Seatools Programs SMART tests are showing no problems with the drives.

This means it must have something to do with the laptop rather than the hard drives. Any idea what might be failing on the laptop? Drivers maybe? As I said it only started when i did a clean install of the laptop...
 
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K

keanedeco115

Prominent
Jan 10, 2018
7
0
520


 
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K

keanedeco115

Prominent
Jan 10, 2018
7
0
520
I figured it out, it was a driver issue. I uninstalled all USB and Chipset drivers and installed the ones meant for my laptop on the Dell Support page. When i reinstalled windows all the chipset drivers were Generic ones so i needed to install the proper ones for it to work. Hard drives running fine now. Thanks for all the help!
 
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