Error checking Hard drive in XP?

[MikeT]

I have a couple of external USB2 Buffalo 250gig hard drives, both fitted with Western digital drives. One is for video clip storage and is near full but behaves fine.
The other is used with Ghost 9 to back up incrimentaly my main pc's h/drive contents.
In the last 2 weeks its started to fail to make the required backup, halting some way into the backup with an error, I tried to do an XP error check on the drive and gave up after around 10hrs when it still wasnt past half way.

I just downloaded windlg.zip which is westerns own dianostic toolkit, I did the basic quick test and the drive passed, I then went on to the extended test and its acting just like xp's test.

Details are 4.5hrs into the test and it estimates another 7.5 to go (which keeps increasing as it was 4hrs to go at 2hrs into the test)
Sectors checked are now 191****** out of 488****** so at this rate it will never finish!

I suppose its possible that the drive has so many errors that it keeps retesting the same area several times before moving on, but how to be sure?

 

[muckshifter]

Sorry to say ... I'm pretty sure the drive needs replacing ... at any time does it say "trying to recover allocation unit" or something simular?

 

[MikeT]

I dont think this diag tool will give any error msg's while its working, just a report at the end, if it ever gets that far

Its now nearly half way and has been going 6hrs with an estimated 8hrs to go ZZZZzzzzz,

With hindsight I should really have tried it on the known good other 250gig drive first to see how long it takes on that before doing the maybe bad one.