What did the Acronis SMART test say? (Reallocated Sectors Count; Spin Retry Count—- click Discs, highlight your drive, hit the SMART parameters tab). (And temperature in the Disk overview tab).
What is the error message when a file copy fails?
Have you had several files fail? Or were you trying the same ones.
You might want to retry the short test, for a slim hope… Edit: after you recover your files.
I’ve had a false total failure from Seagate’s version. Went like this - I started the utility, which it takes a while to find each drive.
Left the room, while it was doing that. Came back and tried the test - total fail.
What happened is that the external drive “went back to sleep” before I came back to start the test.
The testing utility thought it saw too many bad sectors, in a row, so it quit.
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when i try to read something from the drive or copy something to my pc, the drive disconnects after about a minute.
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I misread that at first. I’d thought you were saying the drive disconnected, either direction. 
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Elele - 07 June 2012 03:36 PM
I can still write data on it, but when i try to access data on it or copy files back to my pc it disconnects after a while and then reconnects, interupting the transfer.
since i can still write data without interuptions.
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Yeah, that suggests a bad-sector problem.
When it’s writing, and finds a bad sector, Windows is probably marking the sector bad, then moving on.
But when it’s reading and hits a bad sector, it tries again several times, then quits the copy.
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What’s the best way to get the data off it? Is there a program that transfers file by file, so when it fails i don’t have to start from the beginning again? Or a program that ignores these errors and keeps running?
And maybe tells me what files are broken?
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It’s been too long since I read about that stuff. Kendall Sears says rsync, and it looks good.
If you can get rsync to simply skip to the next file, after each read failure, then that’s ideal (I think it can, but there’s a lot to read there).
You’d run rsync again, then, and it can try to copy out the files which didn’t work the first time. (But this might take forever, if there’s a ton of failures).
(I’ve done that process by hand, a couple of times).
It wouldn’t hurt to put a cooling fan on the drive, while your doing that.
If there’s tons of errors, you could skip any files you can replace.
In fact, just in case there was a head crash, you want to copy the most important files first.
A crash kicks up grit, which will be sandpapering the surface, wherever the head reads. And that makes more grit.
Also, in the worst case, the crashed head could be damaged, and could fall apart while you’re working (or testing).
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“You should have a test which will try to fix errors, but it might bomb out. You might be able to copy more data after that, though.”
How can i do this? Is there a program for that?
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You’d set the WD tool to do an extended test, with a surface scan, and the repair option.
It works like chkdsk - finds and replaces bad sectors.
(But it’s better than chkdsk, because it’ll also replace weak sectors).
It’s a great test to run, when you first get a drive, and every-so-often afterwards.
(So these things don’t sneak up on you, and leave you with a bunch of corrupted files, and a long recovery process).
But there’s 4 problems, if your drive is suffering from massive numbers of bad sectors.
1) If you had a head crash, then the test could do lots more damage.
2) If the drive has run out of spare sectors, then it can’t replace bad ones, and the test will fail.
3) You’ll be wasting spare sectors on weak sectors - which you won’t need done, if you’re returning the drive.
4) When a sector is replaced, then that part of the file could be corrupt (but you won’t know which files).
On the other hand, if there’s a ton of bad sectors, you could do chkdsk with repair, and if it doesn’t run out of spares, then you can copy everything out in one go.
So you could run rsync to catch the files which copy easily, then catalog the “might-be-good”***, do the repair, and copy the rest out with rsync.
*** I say “might be good” because if they threw a read-error in the past, then on the next reboot, the drive would automatically replace the bad sector - and voila - maybe-corrupted file.
You can catalog it the old-fashioned Dos-Window way:
Do your copy to an easy-to-type temporary folder. Say “c:\t”.
Open a Dos prompt. Start->Run, type “Command”, and hit the OK button.
In the window, type “CD\” and hit enter, to go to c:\
Type “cd t” and hit enter..
Type “dir/s>NoErrors.txt” and hit enter.
And there you go. A text file with each file and folder listed out.
Type “exit” and hit enter.
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I submitted a support ticket on the wd site a couple of days ago, but haven’t heard a peep.
I also submitted the serial number there, that’s how i know it is still under warranty.
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Is there a number you can call?
