Removable hard drives crashing in Vista

[realmadmartian]

I have now had THREE hard drives crash in Vista, all having something to do with the fact that I was using them as removable drives. All drives were originally formatted in XP and worked great as removable drives in XP. Something is wrong with how Vista is setup to handle removable drives. I lost two drives using a Kingwin SATA mobile rack and then a third using a trayless SATA mobile rack from a different company. The drive just suddenly becomes inaccessible and the file system is corrupt. It shows up as a raw drive in disk manager. I know this will happen again if I don't figure out what is causing it. Any ideas what could be causing this and how to prevent it?

 

[robbieyahu]

i am experiencing the same phenomenon!!!!! but it gets worse!!!! something is very wrong somehow!!!
we have had 5 x harddrives from new ones to old ones crashing in a very short space of time every time after updates from windows...thes days i get up to 65 updates per day!!!! why??? and this is on my xp AND windows 7 AND vista OS pc's and laptops ....after crashing these discs are useless..not even for using as slave for storage...what is happening here??? anybody experienced the same???

 

[realmadmartian]

I did three things to get rid of my external drive issues:

1. I got rid of Vista and did a fresh install of Windows 7.
2. There was a beta bios update available that fixed a problem with Intel's AHCI ROM.
3. I installed "USB Safely Remove". An awesome product for better safe removal of external drives.

Windows 7 for sure is required. Drive removal is completely different in Windows 7 vs Vista. I did the bios update at the same time, so I can't be sure if that was a factor or not. I installed USB Safely Remove (http://safelyremove.com/) mainly so I could hide all those empty sockets from USB flash memory readers that appear in the removal list, but that could also be helping remove drives more safely. Despite the name, it works for eSATA drives as well. Just remember to either shut off the drive's power or disconnect your drive after clicking to remove it or it may keep spinning. USB Safely Remove does not spin down the drive.

 

[robbieyahu]

that sounds good, i'll do it for my externals but the internals all crashing is still un-answered and this weekend 3 more harddrives crashed
peace4peace

 

[realmadmartian]

An AHCI problem would affect your internals as well. Check your motherboard manufacturer's web site for a bios update, even one listed as beta.

 

[robbieyahu]

thanx martian, will do..sounds good advice for the older pc's but the factor that throws a spanner in the spokes is the fact that one of the brand new laptops also went for a loop.
peace4peace