External USB Drive Enclosures Are the Work of the Devil

I've had a tough week with disk drives. It all started when I made the fateful decision to upgrade my laptop's hard drive.

I had a 2.5" USB drive enclosure that I had bought a long time ago, that I used for a similar situation. Basically the plan was to put the existing drive in the enclosure, put the new drive in the laptop, and then use an image copying utility to copy the image off of the old drive.

So I got the new drive installed, put the old drive in the USB enclosure, and off I went. Except ... I couldn't read the drive in the USB enclosure. That was weird, because I had another drive in it before I started, and was able to read/write to it no problem. I decided to eliminate the enclosure as the problem by taking out the old drive, putting in an even older 3rd drive (the one that had originally been in the enclosure), and tried reading it. No problem reading the drive. Crap. That meant I had done something to the laptop drive when I took it out. Or so I thought.

I put it back in the enclosure again in case I'd just made a bad connection or something the first time. Still didn't work. I tried connecting it to a different PC. Still no go. The drive was spinning up, but it wasn't being recognized.

So, I ended up doing a fresh install of Kubuntu 6.06 onto the new drive. I was annoyed, but the one good thing is I had all my data mirrored to another server, so once I got Kubuntu installed I was able to copy it off of that. What I did NOT have backed up were numerous application installs and preferences, and even worse, the user mode linux filesystem image I'd been using for development at work. I had all the source files and scripts from that filesystem backed up, but not the filesystem itself, so it was going to take time to rebuild that.

The next day at work I spent a good bit of time getting my development environment back up to speed. I took the original laptop drive in with me, still in the enclosure, on the off chance that after resting over night, maybe it would work. Nope! Damn.

I was talking to a couple of my buddies at work about the ordeal, and it occurred to me that the original laptop drive which was NOT working in the USB enclosure was a 7200rpm drive, while the older one that WAS working was a 5400rpm drive. Now, this enclosure draws all its power from the USB port (it actually has two USB connectors). It doesn't have its own power supply. Was it possible that maybe the power requirements of the 7200rpm drive were higher than the 5400rpm? Maybe just enough higher that the enclosure couldn't handle it?

I guess I'll never know for sure, but that's my best guess, because that was the only difference. They were both Seagate drives, and both the same capacity. When I got home that night, I tried reading the drive again from the USB enclosure and it was a no go. Then I took the drive out and reinstalled it in the notebook. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the drive, it worked perfectly. GRRRRRR. So much time wasted.

But my external USB drive enclosure woes were not over. Oh no. One disaster in a week's time was not enough. This laptop drive situation happened a few days ago. Today, when I got to the office, I tried to get on my new development box that I recently acquired. I couldn't get the display to come up. I could ping it, but I couldn't SSH into it. After fiddling around for awhile, I decided to power cycle it, and this time it just hung at the BIOS boot screen.

Now, this is a super fast machine. The only problem with it is that the super fast 10,000rpm drive that comes with it is only 36GB. I planned on using VMWare on it quite a bit, so I really wanted more space. Fortunately (or so I thought) I also happened to have a standard 3.5" external USB drive case at home, with an old 80G IDE drive in it. Perfect! I decided to take it in last week, and moved my home directory to it. It worked fabulously. For about a week.

So, back to today. Every time I tried to boot the machine just kept hanging. On a hunch, I disconnected the external USB drive and tried booting again. The machine came right up! I was relieved. After the machine booted, I logged in as root (since my home directory wasn't mounted). I reconnected the USB drive. I was able to mount it, but when I tried to look at the files on it, it didn't show any. I figured, well, it didn't exactly get umounted cleanly, so I decided to run fsck. But when I tried to do that, fsck complained about not recognizing the reiserfs file system. Doh!

That reminded me, that to save time at the office, before I brought the drive in I had formatted it on my SuSE 10.1 Linux box at home. I formatted it with the reiser filesystem. When I took it in to the office, Fedora Core 5 would not recognize the filesystem. Apparently it doesn't support reiser, at least "out of the box". Sigh. Being relatively new to FC5, I wasn't sure how to go about getting reiser support installed, and since the drive was just an empty, formatted filesystem, I figured it would probably be quicker to just reformat it with ext3, and learn about adding reiserfs support to FC5 some other day. That went fine, I was able to mount the drive, got all my home directory stuff migrated to the USB drive, and everything was just peachy keen. Until today.

Now, as I said, I reformatted that damn thing with ext3 to be able to get it to play with FC5 at all. So I don't know why I today I would get the reiserfs error. I guess some traces of the original reiser format were somehow not completely eliminated. I don't really claim to understand exactly what happened.

Anyway, I just couldn't get it to work. I tried to use fdisk to completely redo the partitions. It started giving me I/O errors. I decided the drive had probably just died. I wondered if maybe if it was getting overheated in the external case. Learning from my laptop drive experience, I decided to mount the drive directly in the machine. (It's a small form factor machine, so it only has one drive bay, which is why I didn't just install it as a secondary drive to begin with).

I tried running the FC5 install, and when it got to the point of searching for existing installations, it blew up. Of course, not immediately. No, it had to churn for awhile first.

So then I began to think maybe it really was the drive. I downloaded the Maxtor drive diagnostics and started running tests. First, the install test. Everything checked out. Then I ran the "basic test". Again, everything was fine. Hmmm. So I ran the extended test, which took quite awhile. NO ERRORS! What the ... well, just for good measure, I decided to run the "low level format" utility.

Heh. "Low level formats" aren't what they used to be. I remember back in the day when you fired up 'debug' in DOS, and ran 'g c800:5' and then waited a few hours. (I'm not sure if I'm remembering that completely correctly. But if I am, it's sorta scary). This low level format just writes zeros over the first few 100K of the drive and the last few 100K and only took a minute or so.

I tried the FC5 installer again. It was much happier this time. And now, the drive appears to be fine! I did unfortunately lose a bunch of time having to reinstall FC5. Very aggravating. I think the most aggravating thing is that, again, I don't really know exactly what went wrong.

But I do know that I don't think I will ever be able to bring myself to use an external USB drive enclosure ever again.

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