Bought a 1 TB My Passport drive in March for holding music files. It is currently about 10% full. I have the drive velcroed to the lid of the laptop I use for DJing (Lenovo ThinkPad X200s, Win7pro-64 bit).
The SMART tests have always passed. I believe this is supposed to predict drive failure.
About 10 days ago I started getting the classic failure described by others in which the machine could not see the drive as G:My Passport but instead it was displaying G:Local. Then I would get the pop-up telling me to format the drive, which I did NOT do. Then I noticed if I moved the USB connection to another USB port, everything was OK. This led me to believe that I had a bad cable.
I also noticed if I used the Windows USB disconnect utility, it still identified the drive as My Passport instead of Local.
I wish I had backed everything up while it was still working, but instead I ordered a new shorter (12 inch) replacement cable. I had lost all access to the disk at this point. The replacement cable did not help. I get the same issue when connected to a WinXp desktop PC.
I ran the Extended Test:
“Too many bad sectors detected”
Elapsed time: 12:58
Estimated time remaining: 36:24:35
…and there it stopped.
Here is how the drive appears in DLGDIAG:
And here are the numbers I still get on the SMART test:
and the rest of the numbers:
Any idea why the SMART test says everything is OK, but the Extended Test gives up?
Is my drive totally trashed? If so, then why does SMART say everything is OK?
What tools can I use to recover the 100 GB of data before sending the drive back for warranty repair?
