USB 2 Transfer Messages

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Of late I started getting the dreaded hardware failure yellow triangle (with
the ! mark) in the system tray shortly after my standard back-up job is done
every other day (from my system and other drives to USB 2 external drives).
Event Viewer turned up the following in relation to the data transfer.

--------------------------------------------------------
Event ID 50:
{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file
"..............". The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a
failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save
this file elsewhere.

Event ID 57:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may
occur.

Event ID 26:
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to
save all the data for the file ".........................". The data has
been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware
or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
--------------------------------------------------------

On checking into everything I could possibly think of, I found:

1. The external hard drives themselves have no problems and SMART
diagnostics do not reveal any current or impending failure.

2. Data integrity checks on backed up files did not turn up a single file
that was corrupted in any way.

3. More time was allowed to elapse before unplugging the USB drives after
transfers complete to enable any and all involved caches to be flushed out
completely.

4. The drives tested okay on other PCs.

5. The failure icon seems to appear at random - I cannot replicate its
occurrence or correlate it with neither any of my four external drives nor
with any of the SmartSync Pro back-up jobs I run.

6. CHKDSK /r, SFC /scannow, as well as viral and malware checks, and also
hardware and driver checks turned up nothing. Yet I still get the error on
this one machine only.

I don't know if it is related but I also noticed that the printer icon now
does not disappear after a print job is finished but stays on, sometimes. A
couple of times I stopped and restarted the spooler service to get rid of
it. The remnant icon does not hamper subsequent print jobs though.

No operational or work lost or hampered in any way, but I'd appreciate if
anybody can suggest where the problem, if any, lies.

Thanks in anticipation.

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Forgot to add that tests - SMART and vendor diagnostics - were done on the
internal drives also. They did not reveal anything negative.

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[Cymbal Man Freq.]

I'm not a M$ technician, but I am following up on these types of problems since
I am experiencing them myself. Your external HDD is in danger of being corrupted
by your machine and you'll have to repartition & reformat the drive and only a
Quick Format MAY work (it may not work too!). So, you may not have gotten your
image files copied, or they may not have copied correctly and that is a work of
no consequence at this point, just erase those files. My point is that if you
keep attempting to fix this problem, your drive may get corrupted and if you
don't have a different machine to help you repartition and reformat your drive
reliably (and how would you know until it was too late?), your drive may wind up
dead in the water.

I was able to quick format my external drive on the Win XP machine after a
nightmarish attempt and failure before, yet I got Event 51 errors when copying
afterward; however, the drive works fine on my Win 98SE machine. Others on the
newsgroup would have you believe your external drive is defective and to return
it to the store for refund, since the problem you describe has remained unsolved
or unacknowledged by M$ (some technical glitches we don't find out about for
over 6 months, then M$ says they knew about the glitch but refused to issue a
patch they had for it or to make the problem known to the public...). I believe
we are early in the complaint process here, and once we get past the
preconceived notions of normal fixes (that don't work), M$ may find the problem
lies within their OS, Win XP...(like an update that screwed up the USB 2.0 ports
in some way).

 

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Thanks very much for the response. I do agree with you on the main thing -
that there is some impending hardware failure that one needs to protect
against!

So I made optical back ups of my hard drive back ups and now at least I have
the assurance that anything lost will only be of very recent original and
easily replaceable from the originals.

A little extra work given for proper back ups do help when it might be
needed.

Regards and thanks very much again for the response.

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[JimHomyak]

Our fix for this was a combination of the following:

Replaced External Drive AC Adapter, after having discovered bent pins
Replaced External Drive USB Cable
Connected to another one of the spare USB ports on the PC's IO back panel

After that, a series of drives suspected as bad are all working now for weeks without issue.

Prior to the above conclusion, other attempts that made little difference were:

System BIOS updates
USB Driver Updates
Reformatting the USB drives