I know this is going to be a long shot for anyone to diagnose what is going on here, but I will give it a go anyway.
I have several external drives in various caddies, and at some point one of these got my laptop all confused. This is going to be quite difficult to explain but in essence, all the drives when plugged in are given the letter F: by this laptop. Now at some point one of these drives (2.5" hdd) did something weird I can't really say what exactly, but the upshot was when that drive was ejected and the next drive put in and I did a "Dir" of that drive in a DOS window, instead of showing the contents of that drive it showed me the contents of the drive that was unplugged. Like there was some kind of caching going on in Windows or something, as I couldn't get the drives actual listing to show on this laptop. On another laptop it showed up OK. The only way I could get this to stop on the first laptop was to format both drives, but it seemed this would eventually happen again spontaneously after a random time, and it would start showing the previous drives listing again. I basically lost trust in this drive and stopped using it.
Now this came to a head this weekend when I was backing up my NAS onto several 3.5" HDD drives in preparation for adding new disks to the NAS. After I had backed everything up on to multiple 3.5" disks using an external docking station, connected to the "confused" laptop, I made the mistake of plugging in that dodgy 2.5" disk in to the station cos I know it also had some stuff on it I wanted to keep, and I was able to get it of ok, and I left that disk in the docking station while I did the NAS upgrade. Anyway, I did the actual NAS upgrade which went ahead without a hitch, all data remained intact on the NAS.
But then I went to check my backup drives in the docking station, dun dun derrrrrrr. I removed the 2.5" I basically had forgotten was dodgy and had left in there, and put in one of the 3.5" discs only this time, instead of just showing me the listing of the previous drive, the whole drive refused to show anything and told me the drive was corrupted. This was was of my main backup drives with my most critical stuff on it. Luckily the NAS was able to re-silver the RAID 5 storage pool ok so I still have everything, but this leaves me trying to explain what the issue is with this one 2.5 drive. My main question is is it down to the Windows install on that laptop which is "remembering" the drive contents associated with the drive letter it gives the drive, after whatever glitch it was that started all this, and therefore a windows reinstall might fix it. Or is it a known issue with a failing drive and I should just bin it? I am guessing bin it will win the vote, but would still like to know if this is at all related to the Windows install somehow retaining/caching the contents of external drives, if they all are given the same letter when plugged it.
Would be impressed if anyone actually read all that so thumbs up if you did.
I have several external drives in various caddies, and at some point one of these got my laptop all confused. This is going to be quite difficult to explain but in essence, all the drives when plugged in are given the letter F: by this laptop. Now at some point one of these drives (2.5" hdd) did something weird I can't really say what exactly, but the upshot was when that drive was ejected and the next drive put in and I did a "Dir" of that drive in a DOS window, instead of showing the contents of that drive it showed me the contents of the drive that was unplugged. Like there was some kind of caching going on in Windows or something, as I couldn't get the drives actual listing to show on this laptop. On another laptop it showed up OK. The only way I could get this to stop on the first laptop was to format both drives, but it seemed this would eventually happen again spontaneously after a random time, and it would start showing the previous drives listing again. I basically lost trust in this drive and stopped using it.
Now this came to a head this weekend when I was backing up my NAS onto several 3.5" HDD drives in preparation for adding new disks to the NAS. After I had backed everything up on to multiple 3.5" disks using an external docking station, connected to the "confused" laptop, I made the mistake of plugging in that dodgy 2.5" disk in to the station cos I know it also had some stuff on it I wanted to keep, and I was able to get it of ok, and I left that disk in the docking station while I did the NAS upgrade. Anyway, I did the actual NAS upgrade which went ahead without a hitch, all data remained intact on the NAS.
But then I went to check my backup drives in the docking station, dun dun derrrrrrr. I removed the 2.5" I basically had forgotten was dodgy and had left in there, and put in one of the 3.5" discs only this time, instead of just showing me the listing of the previous drive, the whole drive refused to show anything and told me the drive was corrupted. This was was of my main backup drives with my most critical stuff on it. Luckily the NAS was able to re-silver the RAID 5 storage pool ok so I still have everything, but this leaves me trying to explain what the issue is with this one 2.5 drive. My main question is is it down to the Windows install on that laptop which is "remembering" the drive contents associated with the drive letter it gives the drive, after whatever glitch it was that started all this, and therefore a windows reinstall might fix it. Or is it a known issue with a failing drive and I should just bin it? I am guessing bin it will win the vote, but would still like to know if this is at all related to the Windows install somehow retaining/caching the contents of external drives, if they all are given the same letter when plugged it.
Would be impressed if anyone actually read all that so thumbs up if you did.