[Seriously need help] External hard disk causes hard drive failures & OS crashes

[masterton]

[Seriously need help] External hard disk causes hard drive failures & OS crashes
The thread is rather long. Only read what you think important. Skip the rest!

We have a serious but mysterious problem. We have spent already one week but drawing a blank.
Two hard drives have been crashed and failed (unreadable). One computer has hung a few times unexpectedly and had one weird restart (no memory dump produced).
I suspect all the recent problems have to do with the new USB external hard disk (Buffalo MiniStation Lite: HD-PE250U2).

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Formatting USB external hard disk
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Originally I would like to use the program given by Buffalo to format the external drive once but we failed. We simply used Windows to reformat the drive into NTFS. I did not use the TurboSpeed advertised by Buffalo, or run its free program.

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Case A: Multi-transfer causes system crashes?
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The first time we met the problem.
We were trying to help a friend to backup data on an old drive, about a few years old. We plugged in the Buffalo USB portable hard drive and transferred a whole lot of files to the drive. Several cop/cut-and-paste operations were active at that time. The whole system completely froze up. It doesn't respond at all. Only a hard restart could help.
Restarted. Tranferred again. Several cop/cut-and-paste operations were active.
Hard drive crashed - the beginning of the nightmare!
Windows restarted. Chkdsk was running. Saw many lines of messages with:
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"
......
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"

Chkdsk run very long time (perhaps a hour or so), complaining that some couldn't be fixed, some okay.
Initially I thought it was simply because it so happened that the hard drive failed in the middle of transfer. But the same nightmare occurred when we tried to plug it into another computer.

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Case B: Open folder causes system crashes?
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I plugged in the Buffalo USB external hard disk on a laptop computer.
I tried to check if transferred files were safe. I have no ideas how to check but it looked okay.
Some files were transferred to and from the external hard drive. I made sure only 1 copy-paste operation was active this time.
Then computer hung for a while and displayed Blue Screen of Death. (I recorded the message on a piece of paper but it was lost later).

Restarted. I believed chkdsk was automatically run and fixed some errors found (not too sure about this). I resumed the work. I made sure only 1 copy-paste operation was active this time.
The system hung this time when I double clicked on a folder (to see what contents inside). Another Blue Screen of Death popped up later:
KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
0x00000077 (0xC000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x0000000, 0x009C7000)
Info on this BSOF: You receive an error message on a Windows XP-based computer: "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR"

Computer restarted. Chkdsk was automatically run. Nightmare again!
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"
......
"File segment record XXXXX is unreadable"

Chkdsk attempted to fix the problem but it complained "not sufficient space". Then I received STOP: C000021a Unknown Hard Error

Oh my gosh! What's up? I don't believe it so happened AGAIN the hard drive failed when some actions were performed between the hard drive and the USB external hard disk. I started to feel something went very wrong. Is it virus?


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Case C: Scanning for virus causes system crashes?
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Searching on the net didn't find any case which was similar to mine.
I tried again on a new computer. Fresh Windows copy. New hard drive (less than 1 year old). Only a handful of programs were installed.
I downloaded Avira and did on-demand scan for my internal hard drive first. No virus was found. Was I safe now?
I plugged in the USB external hard drive and scanned this drive for virus.
My new computer froze when the scanning was close to completion (I believed the progress was about 90%)

Computer restarted. No chkdsk was run automatically. I scanned again from scratch.
I paused it after a while. I had a weird thought that the USB external hard drive may crash our system when it's overloaded.

Then I was browsing on the Internet (perhaps a few hours or so). The scan was kept "paused". The USB hard disk was still plugged. My computer hung again when I tried to click to view a video on YouTube.

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Case D: System crashes without USB hard disk
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OK! I switched the computer off completely and unplugged that "devil".
Using the computer for about one day, computer hung again at night.
Hmm... This computer is new. What's really wrong if it isn't related to the USB hard disk?

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Case E: Transfer a large file causes system crashes
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This test attempts to transfer a single large file (4.33GB) from USB external hard disk to my computer
First attempt: System restarted mysteriously in the middle of transfer. I set it to display BSOD when crashes. The computer shouldn't restart. I didn't see any memory dump either.
Second attempt: System hung after the transfer.



I'm desperate! It's just so strange! I have absolutely no ideas why something like this would happen.

My questions:

1. Really what's going wrong? I don't think USB external hard disk is such a so unreliable product. There must be something I'm missing...
   
2. What checking tools (free or paid) do you recommend to verify whether the transfer is faultless, files being safely moved/copied?
   
3. What file recovery tools (free or shareware) could I use to recover (at least most of) lost data in the hard drives? The tools have to be well (professionally) written. I tried a few but all failed to recover all except a small portion of data. Professional recover services are out of consideration because I know it's very expensive and the data isn't utmost important.
   
4. How could I save/recover data from the laptop computer? I tried to go to safe mode but failed. I received STOP: C000021a Unknown Hard Error. Chkdsk once complained "insufficient disk space" when attempting to fix "file segment unreadable" error. Is it the cause? I also inserted SeaTools CD to do a scan. It said it's loading something to the RAM drive (I had only 1 internal hard disk on the laptop computer). It's loading but never finish. I couldn't even enter into the main screen of SeaTools. I could only see a black screen.

Tell me anything else you want to know.
Ask me any piece of information which helps to troubleshoot the very root of this series of problems.

[happydog99]

I have almost the same problem just recently. My configuration is a notebook connecting external Maxtor hard drives. In the past there were 2 OneTouch drives connecting by USB, and additional 2 connecting through 1394 (cascading). All were running fine untile I replaced 3 of them with a 1TB OneTouch 4 Plus last week, now with 2 1TB OneTouch 4 Plus connecting through 1394.

I got intermittent system crashes with big blue screens when I transferred data to and between the drives. And when the system could be restarted, the notebook hard disk light was almlost never off, and would result in another crash, if I waited long enough. The last event brought down everything, I got KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR, and when I tried to restart the computer, I got UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

I really suspect that the 2 external drives were the causes but cannot explain why. They are simply data drives without OS and used for data storage only. But my notebook is dead and cannot boot now, event after I detach the external hard drives.

It's annoying and mysterious. I don't have any clue yet.


Wesley

[jasonz0rz]

Have you tried to boot from a Windows disc?

[masterton]

This lesson cost us two hard disks. They are dead now. Next time if you see signs of system hangs or crashes or blue screen of death, NEVER plug it again! Stay far far away from it! Send the possibly faulty drive back for replacement.

I'm still looking for non-expensive ways to recover the data from the dead drives. They are not recognisable from Windows.

[masterton]

Have you tried to boot from a Windows disc?

For what?
It doesn't help to repair the damages.
That two hard drives have been dead.

[Lukeno1]

There ARE ways of recognizing hard drives. Do they show up in BIOS? Or Linux? Or another copy of Windows, on another HDD?

[masterton]

There ARE ways of recognizing hard drives. Do they show up in BIOS? Or Linux? Or another copy of Windows, on another HDD?

One shows up in BIOS but it's damaged already (bad sectors). You double click to access it. It will return an error. Another doesn't show up in BIOS. The drive is fixed in the notebook computer. I haven't tried to access it in Linux. Please tell me if anyone knows what imaging software can ignore bad sectors and clone image, or any data recovery software which can deal with damaged drives.