Some portable USB hard drives no longer working on SBS 2003 Server

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Rartemass

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BTW, ID 51 errors are typical and have nothing to do with your hard drive health state. This is MS bug.

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The gist of those threads is you might waste alot of time only to find out there's nothing wrong with the drives, the error 51 are timeout warnings but it retries 'til it succeeds, if the file I/O really failed you'd get an error on that.

Some USB hard drive enclosures I've seen have lowsy firmware on the usb to IDE board, and on those drives when a bad sector is encountered, instead of throwing errors, the drive enclosure "reboots" such that "ding-dong dong-ding" it's as if it was disconnected-reconnected, autorun all over again. Whatever file i/o copy was in progress clearly fails though.

ASKER

Noxcho already tried that as per question, its usb powered

Does it mean that you did already recreate the partitions?

ASKER

I formatted on another PC, weird thing is it works perfect on all other PC's so i'm not sure whether repartitioning will make a difference, also its 2 drives not just the one... so its unlikely

Just try to delete the partition and connect it as blank HDD. This is necessary to check that file system on this drive is not the problem for your server.

ASKER

Repartitioning did not help, trie USB Y cable incase it was a power issue but no luck, would really like to get to the bottom of this.

Is the drive on warranty yet? If not then you could open the case and connect it as internal drive to see if any problem occur. This would let you narrow the problem to USB case if it is the cause.

ASKER

but it works on all other PC's.... + both drives stopped working at once, i think we can rule out the drives

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IMHO the problem is in power lack as your power supply could not have enough output for all the hardware devices you connect to the server.
What power supply is used on this machine?
Look this link: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/73347/

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Jsmply

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ASKER

Its definitely not lack of power, we tried a USB Y cable which has 2 USB sockets into 1, still no luck

Y cable proves nothing though. Insufficient amperage from the usb controller and/or laptop can still be insufficient. You have to imagine if you put a splitter in parallel on an AC plug and then plugged one in one socket, and another in the socket above/below it, or even another socket in the room but both on the same fuse, it's not going to change the 10 or 15 amps into 20 or 30. Same idea.

Optimized for quick removal does NOT mean optimized for improper removal eh

Jsmply

Hi Ocanada. What were you referring to with your last comment?

Quoting:
The most common cause for this (...) is removing the drive without safely removing (editor's paraphrasing: without using safely remove hardware and getting the ok to remove). This seems to sometimes occur even if the drive is set for quick removal in it's properties." unquote
Exactly Jsmply, REGARDLESS of setting optimized for quick removal, you STILL must/should use safely remove or suffer consequences, although the setting might mitigate somewhat and hopefully less likely to cause corruption to the drive, it's not an alternative or substitute for proper safe removal.
(Same on Apple MacBooks and the like, must/should use the Eject icon on the drive and detach once safely ejected)

nobus

you can test - and repair problems with safely remove : http://safelyremove.com/?pid=1

ASKER

Have got rid of the freecom drives and purchased a seagate one instead which works fine, toshiba ones work fine too. I'll probably avoid Freecom in future, the tech support was terrible, I'll keep this question as the suggestions may be useful in future for someone else.