nesdev.org

koitsu wrote:If your source (i.e. reads) is returning I/O errors, then there's no point in bothering with generating checksums or any other comparisons because an I/O error is already indicative that your source cannot be trusted (i.e. restore from backups).

I'm being given the impression that it's the destination drive the one that is having issues (probably needs clarification on the OP's part).

Sik wrote:I'm being given the impression that it's the destination drive the one that is having issues.

Correct.

Ah I see now. Yep legitimate use of /V or the like.

I can only think of a few conditions where a drive would return an I/O error on a write -- particularly if the drive has a tremendous amount of reallocated LBAs to the point of exhausting the spare sector table. I experienced that for the first time on a large disk just a few weeks ago while doing data recovery for someone.

If you can get SMART attributes from the destination drive (a utility like HD Tune Pro, specifically the Health tab, might suffice -- but there's a lot of info that utility doesn't provide that smartmontools/smartctl.exe does) I can tell you if anything looks ominous or if it's something related to a USB/SATA bridge or at some other layer (i.e. "drive looks fine, issue is elsewhere").

Those USB/SATA bridges ("drive enclosures") are such a pain in the butt. So many of them do things that they shouldn't when it comes to ATA protocol. Sad koitsu.

koitsu wrote:Those USB/SATA bridges ("drive enclosures") are such a pain in the butt. So many of them do things that they shouldn't when it comes to ATA protocol. Sad koitsu.

If you had a blog, you could review these USB to ATA and USB to SATA bridges and tell us which ones suck and why. That way we could tell people not to buy one on the "sad koitsu" list.

I bet the problem is... Windows 7. The file (.mp4 video) is copied, but fails on playback. The same file is copied into my HDD and no problems on playback.

So are you saying Windows 7 randomly corrupts files?

Only for attached devices, such as my external HDD. I remember of... Disch? saying something about this.

Well, in that case I would strongly suspect that the device is failing, your motherboard's USB interface is in question, or you have bad/wrong drivers for the device loaded.

I remember having issues with a 3.5" IDE drive attached to a Cables-to-Go bridge as the destination for BitTorrent downloads. Downloads would "complete", but re-checking would reveal a handful of blocks wish hash mismatches. From doing research I determined that this paricular bridge was commonly rebadged by a number of companies. Perhaps this is related to your issue?

Movax12 wrote:Well, in that case I would strongly suspect that the device is failing, your motherboard's USB interface is in question, or you have bad/wrong drivers for the device loaded.

I already mentioned a program Zepper could use that might give me (some of) the information to determine if the actual drive within the enclosure is bad, or if there is something wonky going on in the middle of all of that.

To recap: HD Tune Pro (NOT the free version; just get the latest and it'll function for 30 days without you having to buy it). I need a screenshot of the Health tab, window resized to show all the attributes, with the proper drive selected.

If no attributes are shown, then the SATA/USB bridge does not permit SMART ATA CDB passthrough, which means it's one of those chips which makes it impossible to actually get visibility into drive-level issues (you'd instead have to take the drive out of the enclosure and attach it to a SATA port directly).

If attributes are shown, then I also need a screenshot of the Info tab, so I know what drive model I'm looking at, in addition to some general drive details. "Decoding" attributes needs to be left to someone who knows how to decode them (i.e. me). How to decode them varies per manufacturer, drive model, and sometimes firmware revision.

But attribute review isn't 100% indicative of a problem or things working correctly; there are things like SMART self-test logs and SMART error logs which HD Tune Pro does not provide visibility into, but utilities like smartmontools do. smartmontools is available for Windows as a CLI program smartctl.exe and can work with some USB/SATA bridges but figuring out what value to pass to -d is painful. Sometimes smartctl --scan can help determine that. But again, not all USB/SATA bridges support SMART ATA CDB passthrough, while to make matters even more annoying, some support it but only certain sub-CDB fields are passed while others aren't (ex. fetching attributes is allowed but examining logs isn't). This is one of the many reasons why I hate those bridges -- they act as a middle-man and often filter or rewrite CDBs.

Wait, if I'm reading right, that's 88 bad sectors in that drive? o.O Um yeah, unless the adapter is messing with the values I think that drive is pretty much a no-go at this point...

Using chkdsk now...

Sik wrote:Wait, if I'm reading right, that's 88 bad sectors in that drive?

But they're not user-visible ... they're ones that have been reallocated from the hidden extra portion of the disk to keep you from losing data once they start dying.
It's still a bad sign, because once sectors start going, they tend to continue.

Sik wrote:Wait, if I'm reading right, that's 88 bad sectors in that drive? o.O Um yeah, unless the adapter is messing with the values I think that drive is pretty much a no-go at this point...

No offence intended, but no. And this is why I said (quoting myself):

koitsu wrote:If attributes are shown, then I also need a screenshot of the Info tab, so I know what drive model I'm looking at, in addition to some general drive details. "Decoding" attributes needs to be left to someone who knows how to decode them (i.e. me).