I/O Divice Error... Any hope?

[peterpopanut]

I have an external hard drive that recently started messing up on me. I can plug it in and it will start to read everythiing on it, but when i go to some folders, I get an I/O Divice Error. I have hours upon hours of work on here and would hate to loose the info... i dont care if the hard drive will be useless afterwards... i just need the stuff on there... is there any hope for me?

 

[PC eye]

How is that one connected Firewire, eSata, usb? Some will simply remove the drive out of the external casing to see them plugged in inside a case for use there at times. If you left the original Fat32 factory partition on that was a big goof often made!

The I/O error sounds more like a connection rather then drive problem being seen or a glitch with the software needed with the partition still being Fat and not NTFS. For this trying a different cable or port would be one thought to see if that will help.

The last option if the drive is starting to go is setting it up differently like in another external drive case if not internally in order to backup what you can on an internal drive.

 

[peterpopanut]

Thank you for the reply...

I ended up finding out that it was a currupt file. However, even after deleting the file, adding any info will cause the error to pop up. So I just bought a bigger hard drive and transfered all the files over to the new one.

The device was connected via USB... I tried different cords as well as different USB ports.

 

[PC eye]

When you start seeing problems writing to a drive that would otherwise be easily accessible for storing files on it tends to be a problem with a drive's haeds. I've run into that a few times lately with internal drives suddenly seeing Windows problems where any repair install or other system restoration methods were pointless.

You could read from, delete active primaries, but nothing at all could be written to two drives on two totally separate systems. The drives were different brands as well. Besides that however a Windows glitch can also cause errors like that until confirming a hardware problem is present.

At least you took the time to rule things out by testing with different usb cords and other ports. I suspect the drive is simply in an external casing and a strictly external model there since you could easily replace cords.