I have a 300 gig USB removable storage unit that will be working fine and then I get these windows write errors and it will drop out. I will then have to remove the usb cable and reinsert it. This particular drive also works on firewire and I have the same problem there. This problem is happening on my laptop as well as my desktop. I'm assuming from that it's a problem in the drive itself. Can anyone help? Should I be jumpering it in a specific manner. I currently have it jumped as Master.

Had the same problem with my external drive. I reformated and never had a problem for the last 11 months.

It sounds like the IDE to USB and Firewire adapter inside the external enclosure may be buggy or your hard drive may not be functioning quite correctly.

I would suggest backing up the data to another device and then running some tests on the drive.

A good way to test it would be to get a copy of Knoppix from here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/kno [...] -23-EN.iso
700MB CD

http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/kno [...] -16-EN.iso
3.1GB DVD

burn it onto CDR or DVDR boot from it and see if the problem occurs under Linux as well. If it does then you will know with virtual certainty it is a hardware problem.

If the drive behaves the same way, Linux will most likely give you some error messages or other information that you should be able to use to resolve the problem.

You can also try running a full scandisk under windows but that could take hours or days on a 300GB disk.

Whatever you decide to do please backup your data first!

Good luck!