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[Tom2010]

 I have a OneTouch 4 1TB as follows:

Unit Model: Maxtor  OneTouch
Model: ST31000340AS

Firmware Revision: SD81

I have been using just fine for a long while now. It seems to work great. However, today I resumed my system from hibernation as I've done many times before, and I got errors in Windows Explorer when attempting to access its drive letter (F. From a command line, I would get the following message: "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."

I ran the following command from the command prompt: chkdsk /f /v /r /x f:

It took a long long time (about half the day) to complete, but it found a number of errors and fixed them, and after, the drive became accessible and seemed fixed. Some of the items it had found seemed as though they were from the root of the drive, so I'm wondering if the root directory information got botched somehow. 

Since I've been using this drive in relatively the same manner for some time, this issue surprised and concerned me. 

Are there any issues that have come up with this drive, are there any firmware updates, or do you have any other best-practices precautionary steps I should take to avoid or protect against this in the future?

One thing I'm thinking is that I might not hibernate without first removing the drive, but I haven't had to do that before, so I'm not sure that is related, and I'd prefer not to take unnecessary steps which don't help anything. My main goal is to ensure I proceed forward as safely as possible without totally inconveniencing my workflow. This failure cost half a day, and it would have cost much more had a I lost the data, so I'd like to avoid it again if possible. I realize drives go bad but I'm not sure that's the cause here. Is there a way to tell how it went bad? (i.e., a log on the drive or something... I did a seatools diag after chkdsk fixed things but it reports good health and I didn't see information on why any prior errors may have occurred... maybe I missed something so let me know.)

Thanks for any tips,

Tom

[MrButkus]

Is this on a Firewire connection ?  I had mine on a Firewire connection.. evey few months it would get corrupt.  Changed to a USB and nare a problem in a few months.

I even made changes in the settings about "Quick Removal".

[Tom2010]

It's USB, not Firewire. I've had it since about 11/08, a little more than a year, and I have never had this happen before. Do you use hibernation, and if so, do you do it while the drive is still attached? I'm wondering if some quirk happened there.

[Tom2010]

I ran into the same corruption again. I don't know why I've seen two corruptions within the span of a few weeks. My OneTouch 4 is 1TB and has firmware 01.2.5... someone mentioned that certain onetouch devices had been recalled. Is there a way to find out if I fit into that list?

Here is what I experienced the second time around. There was an interesting security-related nuance I ran into which others may want to know about so here's what happened if it helps... 

This time I did not have the same luck with chkdsk. I would run chkdsk, and it would finish as if successful, but the drive itself was reporting "Location is not available", "Access is denied", and drive letter "is not available" when clicking on the drive letter in explorer.

At first I ran chkdsk again, which seemed to do more stuff, but the same access denied existed after it was done.

Finally, I got hold of r-studio file recovery software (worked great) which was able to access the root directory and all files below with relative ease. After recovering stuff first, I then tried to revive the drive.

Given the access denied messages, I focused on faulty or bad security attributes on the drive itself and folders below. Interestingly, I could use icacls and takeown from an elevated command prompt, and I could do a directory of the driver letter's contents, but I still could not see the drive itself in explorer. I would get the same access denied message, and right-clicking the drive in explorer did not show a Security tab as it would for other drives (other drives which were okay).

I found a great tip in the following post: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=onetouch&message.id=5946&query.id=901#M5946

In that post, the person explains how to access the drive letter Security tab by using Device Manager/Disk Drives/right-click drive, Properties/Volumes/click Populate, and when the drive letter appears, select and click Properties there. That Properties dialog *does* have the Security tab. From there, it's easy to assign permissions which match a good directory on, for example, a system or other drive (i.e., I right-clicked and looked at Security settings for a good drive, and applied the same settings to my problem drive using the Security tab accessed via dev mgr). When using the Security tab to fix this problem, I chose the Advanced button in the Security tab and set good default perms, and chose to update all child objects. After that step, I could once again see my drive in Explorer.

So it seems I experienced the same corruption issue which chkdsk fixed, but where I could not see the positive results afterwards because the drive was not accessible. I ran check disk a couple of times and it kept fixing and finding stuff. I'm not sure why that was, but after doing that a few times, I ended up having some sort of permissions corruption on the drive (discussed above) which was not resolved by chkdsk, and which needed manual attention. The key to this 2nd permissions issue/symptom is that I could use Device Manager to access the Security tab for the drive, where right-clicking the drive letter in Explorer would *not* produce a dialog with a Security tab (i.e., I would get Security from the dev mgr way, but not from within Explorer). I was going to try booting into a recovery boot or some such but I'm glad I found the Device Manager way of getting at that security tab for the drive letter. I could access subfolders and files with icacls/takeown, but not the root drive letter security, but dev mgr way was the trick there.