SOLVED Flakey Hard Drive

[Remo]

I purchased a 3TB Toshiba drive that I wanted to mount in a removable hard drive bay for backing up another 3TB drive that I have a lot of data on. Using EaseUS Todo software I made a full backup and a couple of incremental backups without difficulty. Then I started having problems reading the drive. I could insert it into the drive bay and sometimes it would appear and other times it would not. Sometimes I could move it along by doing a rescan of the drives in Disk Management. Eventually I contacted EaseUS Todo support, which was pretty good, and they said I needed to reformat my drive. I did that and ran the backup again along with some incremental backups.

Now I'm trying to do another incremental backup and I can can't reliably get the drive to mount. Finally, I took another drive and made another backup on it, which worked without issue. Then I started a reformat on the Toshiba drive again. The reformat seemed to finish in about 20 hours but the drive still does not mount properly. I realized that my format did not complete as the drive still had data on it. I formatted it again using the EaseUS Partition software. This took it to a raw state but did not create a NTFS partition. I attempted to create the partition and the drive now kind of locks up the computer. If I boot with the drive in the bay, the computer never completes the boot, but does so immediately once I remove the drive. Likewise, if I add the drive after booting and then go to Disk Management and do a rescan, Disk Management locks up indefinitely or until I remove the drive, at which point Disk Management recovers OK.

I have another, 160GB Seagate drive that I put in the drive bay. This drive was used and formatted in four partitions. Using the EaseUS Partition software I was easily able to merge the four partitions and format the drive to NTFS. If I remove it, it disappears from the Explorer drive list like it should, and if I put it back in, it shows up in a few seconds. I can read and write to it with no difficulty.

How do I get this Toshiba drive properly formatted to NTFS, now that it won't show up, and why would it be so temperamental about being mounted and dismounted?

 

[Trouble]

Personally, I'd return the drive to the seller for a refund and purchase a Seagate or Western Digital drive.

When you configured the drive did you use GPT or MBR?

Do you have a means to connect the drive to the computer internally / directly without the use of the drive bay in order to test to see if it exhibits the same symptoms?
I suppose that it's possible that the enclosure's electronics may not be either, supplying sufficient power to meet the demands of the larger drive..... OR
May not be sophisticated enough to handle the interface cross-over and failing to see the drive reliably as 3 terabytes.

 

[Remo]

I don't recall if it was GPT or MBR, but it is not MBR now. I have connected the drive directly and it does not seem to make any difference. The removable drive bay is just a simple pass through of the SATA and power cables, though I don't know enough about the technology involved to be sure that makes no difference. The big internal drive I have is a matching drive and it has worked flawlessly. I was planning to run these as a RAID 1 but that quickly proved to be problematic.

If I try to return the drive to Toshiba, what do I claim the issues is? That it's just kind of funky?

 

[Trouble]

Did you buy it directly from Toshiba?

IF you are going to claim your warranty from the manufacturer, then typically you contact them, start a trouble ticket, they might give you a test to run which will produce a code that you use on the RMA.

 

[Remo]

I purchased it from Newegg a little over a year ago. Should I reach out to them?

 

[BigFeet]

Check the SMART data on the hard drive with CrystalDiskInfo to see if it's reporting bad sectors or other issues. I had to RMA a Western Digital drive not long ago that was about the same age. You will probably have to go through Toshiba to get the process started.

 

[Trouble]

Yep..... no way Newegg has any responsibility a year out from purchase.
You're gonna need an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) from the Manufacturer.
AND
Even then, some drives are not gonna have a warranty that extends over a year.
You might want to start here
https://support.toshiba.com/warranty

 

[Grizzly]

I purchased it from Newegg a little over a year ago. Should I reach out to them?

Newegg will do sh*t as they will tell you to contact the manufacturer. I have not found a diagnosic tool from Toshiba like the ones from WD, Seagate etc....

 

[Remo]

I've reached out to Toshiba but I doubt they are going to do anything. And, I'm not convinced the disk is bad - just screwed up.

I ran the machine using Paragon's recovery disk. This could see the drive but couldn't work on it because it "had no volume". I then ran Seatools and Seatools wiil see the drive and it passes Seatools' various tests. Seatools does not have a tool to create a volume on it however.

Interestingly, after running Seatools, the drive (H) now shows up in Explorer. However, I can't run Disk Management because that still hangs when the drive is present. However, now EaseUS Parttion Manager can see the drive and I can work on it. I'm trying to format it now, but the program has stopped responding. I'll get back.

 

[Remo]

OK, I think I fixed it. EaseUS Todo Partition Manager completed the format of the drive in about five minutes and the drive now shows up in Explorer and in Disk Management. I'm going to start a backup process to the H drive and let it run overnight. I'll let you know how it does in the morning.

 

[Remo]

AM Update: The backup ran overnight and completed. All is well but I will need to monitor the drive as I remove it for off site storage and then return it for incremental backup updates. At least now the drive is back to where it is functioning.

 

[Grizzly]

Another Tip:

when one of my drive start to rebel, I treat it with a round of DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke). It deletes everything without the chance of recovery. After its done (which can take a day), I format the drive again as it it basically like new although it does not happen very often anyway...
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/dban/dban-2.3.0/dban-2.3.0_i586.iso/download

 

[Saltgrass]

If you are backing a 3TB drive to another 3TB drive, which is not configured to allow the full 3TB to be used but only 2.2 TB, you could be causing the problem.

Diskpart is a wonderful tool you can use to clean the drive and start over then configure it to GPT so it will recognize the full 3 TB.