External HD weirdness

HarshLanguage

I have a 500gb Western Digital My Book hard drive. I'm beginning to doubt its reliability, which renders it pretty useless. The thing is, based on the errors I get, I'm not sure it's a hardware problem -- but that's what I'd like your opinions on.

What happens is various oddities and errors with the drive in Windows Explorer, such as:

- If I leave the drive plugged in for, say, more than a couple days, I will eventually get an disk read error message when trying to access it. This happens pretty regularly.
- Go to My Computer, drive is not listed (even many minutes after plugging in the drive)
- Open any top-level folder on the drive, no files/folders are listed inside. 0 objects. Scary! They show up normally after I replug the drive. This error doesn't happen often, thankfully.

This is under Win XP, and the drive is formatted FAT32. So am I looking at benign Windows bugs here? Can I fix these errors, or safely ignore them? Or should I start looking for a new drive?

shadydentist

FAT32? One possible solution is to backup everything you need and reformat in NTFS and see if that fixes anything, but I'd try that as a last resort.

SiliconStew

Check the Power Management properties of the USB Hub devices in device manager. Don't allow windows to turn off the USB ports to save power. See if that helps.

HarshLanguage

SiliconStew wrote: »

Check the Power Management properties of the USB Hub devices in device manager. Don't allow windows to turn off the USB ports to save power. See if that helps.

Thanks, I changed that setting on the two USB Root Hub devices listed, and I'll see what happens.

shadydentist wrote: »

FAT32? One possible solution is to backup everything you need and reformat in NTFS and see if that fixes anything, but I'd try that as a last resort.

Yeah, I should have reformatted to NTFS when I first got the drive. When it's feasible for me to reformat it, I definitely plan to do so.