Philips USB 160Gb external drive - Help please!

[megakid]

Hi all,

Just been round a mates house to fix a problem with his USB external hard drive and I'm stumped. I've bought the drive back here, it is not just an enclosure so I cannot open it up and plug the drive straight into my computer so I have to run it through the USB interface, ruling out any pure DOS applications.

Basically it is acting very funny, keeps coming up with "Delayed write failure: K:\$Mtf" - I know this is bad, but I'm hoping to completely wipe the drive clean and start afresh. I've tried Administration tools -> Computer Management in WinXP Pro but when I try to delete the partitions on the drive (if they appear in the list at all - sometimes they do, sometimes they dont) it just comes up with an error box telling me to consult the System Event Log (which shows it as "Unspecified error (80004005)." - Source - LDM).

Firstly I'm trying to work out if this is a USB issue or a disk issue/partition? I want to completely wipe the partitions so I dont care about any data on the drive, how can I start afresh?

Cheers,

James

 

[rpstewart]

Delayed Write Failures usually mean the drive is on the way out and the best method of determining if that is the case is the drive manufacturers diagnostics - which are DOS apps. Therefore you might be stuck.

One option might be to look into DOS USB drivers of the kind that Ghost has for restoring from USB drives, that might allow you to hack together a copy of the diagnostics which would be able to see the drive.