Other Help Topics :: External usb hard drive

Quote (CAPTAIN RON N FL @ July 14 2007,19:24)

I ran the Recovery Console but it would not let me do the E drive. It did not recognize chkdsk/fE:. It would let me run chkdsk but it only would do C. Maybe I did something wrong.

No, you didn't do anything wrong.
I wasn't sure if the Windows XP CD could recognize USB hard disks, and I didn't want to complicate my first post, so I just suggested trying it out - In other words, I half-expected it to fail.
Very sorry about this. I should have brought it up earlier instead of wasting your time.

Could you please do the following instead:
1. Take out the hard drives from the USB enclosures.
2. Plug the hard drives into motherboard's IDE ports.
(Are you aware of how Master/Slave for IDE drives works? If not, see here)
3. Boot from the Windows XP CD and run `chkdsk` on all the drives.
* I realize this is very troublesome, but I think it's the proper way to solve the problem. Also, very sorry for not telling you about the USB thing.

EDIT: Are you on a laptop and not a desktop? If so, I will see if there is some way `chkdsk` can work with USB drives.

Yes, I believe it may be possible to run `chkdsk` on a USB drive.
I have only followed the information stated in the `chkdsk` manual, here (www.microsoft.com).
Do try the following (from Windows XP, not the XP CD):
`chkdsk drive_letter /r /x`

The `chkdsk` manual warns that this may take a long time.
Quote:
"If you use chkdsk /f on a very large disk (for example, 70 gigabytes) or a disk with a very large number of files (for example, millions of files), chkdsk might take a long time (for example, over several days) to complete. The computer is not available during this time because chkdsk does not relinquish control until it is finished."

I think this is likely the worst-case scenario, but I am not sure. It sounds like a good warning for people using 80GB drives with a Pentium II. It should be much faster on modern systems, but should still take a pretty long time. The real killer is the 'bad block checking' feature. Checking for bad blocks on an ext3 filesystem in Linux takes very, very long as well.

I went to Microsoft and found that I was doing it wrong.
It should be "chkdsk E /f ".
I got this " Unable to determine volume version and state local disk E".
I am using a laptop... but that should be ok as chkdsk does work with usb drives[ as luck would have it... someone threw out a tower without hard drive and cd player. It even has ram and a card reader I have not tried it yet but will when I get time.XXXX no worky]. Oh well.
I found three different ways to get chkdsk to work. All with the same results as above. I have not tried the /p or /r command yet. I figure it would say the same thing.
Now that I have done a clean install my laptop sees the external drive but when I click on it it says it needs to be formated.
That is where I am at now. I have been Googling with nothing found that will help yet.
Thanks, Ron

Quote (lucky13 @ July 13 2007,07:56)

There's no problem reading NTFS with Linux. Linux has been able to read NTFS since kernel 2.2.

NTFS is a standard. There are no changes in NTFS between Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista; just as there are no changes in ext2 between Linux kernel versions.

True; I have no problem accessing XP files (mp3's, pdf's, docs, etc) using DSL. I'm not sure why I had to format to ext3 to begin with. Will DSL install to NTFS, or do you need 83 Linux ID?

EDIT: oops...guess it's a read-only system.....

Well no luck so far.
I guess the emachine board is bad. I have two other emachine boards that are the same way. I guess they must have gotten a batch of boards that were bad.
Thanks, Ron

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