Thread: Data gets corrupted when stimulated to external USB drive

Hi,

I have recently got an 80 GB laptop hard drive which I make use of it as an external storage with the help of USB enclosure. For the first few months, it was working smoothly. But now for the last few weeks I am coming across that whatever I copy to it, it gets a little bit corrupted. Zip archives, as long as they are on my internal drive they are working fine over there. But when I shift them to my external drive and examine then, it will then show certain portions is been corrupted. Videos are also working fine when they are on my internal drive but when they are been shifted to the external one, they start displaying jitters. The images also require to be first checked them when on my internal drive, the result is ok but when moved to the alike external drive, the checksum always fails out. This sort of problem is only with that particular laptop hard drive which is been converted into an external drive. I have also verified with the other USB drives, flash memories, memory cards and they all are work fine in it. At first, I considered it that the problem is with the hard drive only. I scanned it for all the bad sectors and all the other errors many times but each time I got that the hard disk is ok. Occasionally I did get errors and they were fixed by the software but that didn't fix my above related issue.
Now, my question is to you is that what is causing this corruption of data in my laptop? Is it since of my USB enclosure?

Any help will be highly appreciated.
Regards

There are three reasons that could have been causing this.

1) Division damaged. Take a note of the drive letter that is assigned to the external drive (for example F , Go to Command Prompt (Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt). Enter the command chkdsk X: /f, where X: is the letter of the drive.

2) Check that USB Cable is broken or not. Try a dissimilar USB cable for it.

3) Circuit board of the drive is coming across a problem. Open all the enclosure and then confirm that the drive is accurately seated. If so, you may require getting a new enclosure.

Thanks for the tips offered to me. I will definitely try each one of them.

I have examined my drive with GNU/Linux command badblocks and founded out numerous bad sectors in it. Is it possible that badblocks returned so many bad sectors due to the reason of some problem with the USB enclosure? I mean that the USB cable or USB enclosure are busted out which is the reason why bad sectors is unable to scan the disk accurately, resulting in bad sectors' result. Is it possible?

Are you able to make use of this utility for repairing the bad sectors? If it is not capable to fix the bad sectors, then it may indeed be caused by the enclosure itself.

Make use of the programs which returns to SMART reports. You will possibly locate the Reallocated Sectors Count has reached its limit.

Hi,

Well I found out that a problem was generally with the USB enclosure. I also scanned my whole drive by using the GNU/Linux tool badblocks. When I read the entire output of the file, all the bad blocks were in succeeding numbers, starting from the lowest to the highest. If that was true then my entire drive would be completely gone. But I was able to access the entire file, with encountering little bit of corruption. So I lastly finalized to go and try a new enclosure first. And it worked! Now my drive is working fine and my files aren't showing corruption any more.