[ehenry5]

Alright, so I have a seagate freeagent 500gb usb2 drive that is having some difficulties. Actually I don't think it is the drive, but I'm not sure.

I plugged in the drive yesterday and I left it alone until this morning. This morning everything was going just fine when I received a "Disk write delay" error (or something like that) while I was trying to move a file from one folder to another. Then it just wouldn't work right. The drive would show up in "My Computer", but it said it was a "raw" filesystem, with no capacity or used space listed. It shows up as "healthy" in the xp disk management utility, and even shows it as having the right capacity.

I tried plugging it in to my wife's mac and it worked fine (minus the read only ability that macs have with ntfs). A while later I plugged it back in to my computer and it seemed to function correctly for 10-20 minutes. Then I get the same thing with the "Disk write delay", and then no access.

I'm wondering if my USB controller is possibly having some problems, but I'm not sure how to even test that (although my wireless usb keyboard/mouse work fine).

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[rgreen4]

My actual hands on experience with USB connected external drives (sold as such) is limited to 2 WD's and a Simpletech, but another discussion over the weekend discussed short comings in most and mentioned an overheating problem with Seagates. Now I have a large number of Seagate internal drives installed, and in backup positions but not the externals.

Plug the drive into your machine and see if you are having a problem in reading the drive after 30 minutes. If you do, plug it back into your wife's Mac and after about 30 minutes see if any problems with reading a file crop up.

If the problem only arises when trying to write to the drive, then find another machine, at a friends house maybe or at work that you can connect to and go though the time test on that machine. If the problem replicates itself on another machine, then you know it's the drive and contact Seagate about a warranty claim. If it does not replicate itself on another machine, then you know that it's your machine and that is actually a bigger problem depending on the machine.

Many machines have front and back USB ports. Sometimes these ports are connected to different controllers on the MB. I have a 4 1/2 year old desktop that I tried to use a USB modem on. It would not work when plugged into the rear ports (any of them), but worked fine when plugged into the front ports. That was before I became aware of different controllers on some MB's. You could also try that.