How do I fix I/O errors on an external hard drive?

Question

So I plug in my maxtor onetouch mini 160gb into my computer, and I cant get it to open. Sometimes it show up in My Computer, sometimes it takes a while for My Computer to load, and then It will appear, but when I click on it, I get an error saying something about an I/O error. Same thing if I right click on it.
The drive wont show up in disk management, or in SpinRite (a boot diagnostic program), and I cant chkdsk it from cmd either.

The errors in the Event Viewer say:
Warning: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation. (Event ID 51)
Error: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D. (Event ID 11)

How can I fix this drive? (Or at least recover the information from it).

Answer 1

I'll agree with the first answerer who said Western DIgital. It's the only hard drive I use. They have a low failure rate, both ATA (40 pin old school) and SATA (which is really what's inside that case, it's a SATA laptop hard drive attached to a 5 volt adapter converted to a USB interface.)



From what you're telling us, it sounds like that drive has taken a pretty substancal drop, or bounce, or something, and that drive is failing.



Also, I didn't see mention, but if you're getting "Disk I/O Error - Cyclic Redundency Check" .. that drive is pretty well dead.

Answer 2

You're getting multiple kinds of errors-



I/O lines are bus lines that the processor uses to communicate with the hard drive or other peripheral. Each device has its own I/O line.



A controller is a piece of firmware on the motherboard that tells the operating system how to communicate with the device. Think of it as a bridge, to give the following, operating system ---- driver ---- controller ------ device



A paging operation is when the hard drive is used as RAM and is known as virtual memory. The data is transferred to the virtual memory area and then moved to main RAM.



Try the disk on a different computer. If it does the same thing it's the hard drive. You can reformat it and see if it works.



If it works on the second computer, try a different port on the first computer. If that doesn't work, then your bus controller has gone bad. This is a motherboard problem and you need a new board.

Answer 3

How old is the drive? USB drive? To be honest Maxtor makes some crappy drives. Stick with Seagate or Western Digital in the future.



Make sure the drive is formatted for PC and not MAC.

When you get I/O errors on a hard drive the drive is usually gone bad. If it is a new drive, you might need to download a driver from Maxtors website, or update your usb driver via microsoft update.



Test the drive on another PC - at work or a friends house, etc. If the disk has gone bad you are not gonna get data off it without the use of special drive software tools. It would be very expensive to get data off the drive if you can not communicate with the drive at all. If you can access a failing drive you have a greater chance of bad sector data recovery (altho the files are corrupt many times when you get them off).