After Defrag, Win XP External Drive all of the sudden has I/O error, and I cannot access it

[magicianstalk]

Hey all,

Hello, a friend of mine isrunning win XP SP 2 and has an
external 160 gig Maxtor Drive. All was working fine until he decided
to defrag the Drive. Now, the drive will not respond correctly at
all. When connected with fire wire, the message comes up "error,
please format drive", and when connected with the USB 2.0 cable, it
says "the request could not be performed because of an i/o device
Error". We have about 150 gigs of data on the drive.... When
connected, the drive is real taxing on the system, like it's trying to
work, but cant -- it spins and everything..... Thanks for your
help...

Matt
([email protected])

 

[Bob Harris]

Ususally a defrag (Xp, Norton, or Diskeeper) is "safe". But, nothing on a
PC is 100% safe all the time, OR the disk could have had a problem and the
stress of defragging pushed it over the edge, OR the USB cable/interface
could be faultly. So, given where you are:

1. Try reading the disk in another computer, and with another USB cable.
I have had cables go bad, so maybe you will get lucky.

2. Try running the XP recovery console, form the XP CDROM. If you do not
have a CDROM (some pre-loaded verison of XP don't some with it), then
download the multiple-floppy equivalent from Microsoft. They call it XP
setup floppies.

3. Once in the recovery console, try CHKDSK letter /R, where letter is the
drive letter of the external disk. This may run many minutes o hours. This
letter may be different than when in windows. The most likely letters are
either one more than the last windows letter, OR one after the last internal
hard drive. Note that there is no harm in running CHKDSK on other disks.
It will not run on an optical drive.

4. If CHKDSK can not find the drive, then try the FIXMBR command. This
assumes that the problem is not mechanical (i.e., crashed disk), but
software-related. Be very careful to use FIXMBR on the external disk, NOT
on your internal disk. The format of this command is FIXMBR device, where
device is determined from the MAP command. So, first use the MAP command to
see all devices. Assuming only one nternal hard drive, the external hard
drive should be called something like \Device\Harddisk2\Partition1. (Note
Harddisk2, **2** not **1**).

5. If FIXMBR works, then try CHKDSK with the /R option.

If the recovery console asks for a password, use the password for the
original adminstrator, the one who installed XP. If you do not know it, hit
the return key, and hope that it was blank. If Dell, Gateway, etc, ask them
for the password and/or how to access the recovery console.

Since it sounds like you can still get into XP, one way to bypass the
recovery console password is as follows:

Run REGEDIT:



Start à Run à Regedit


Navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole


Set the DWORD SecurityLevel value to 1


Now try the recovery console, and it should not ask for a password. Note
that this does reduce the security of the system a little, but then no
version of Windows is really secure, if someone has physical access to the
PC.