TI Home 2009 works as hoped
TI Home 2009 build 9796 Windows XP Pro SP3
After reading all the stories of woe in this forum, I thought I should drop a line to describe my successful disk recovery.
I recently noticed numerous "warning" messages in the System event log suggesting that my "D:" drive was failing [turns out I was misinterpreting the messages, but more on that later*].
I ordered a new drive, did a full image backup of the old drive, swapped in the new drive, did a restore from the backup and was back on the air with no tears. Everything worked as advertised and as hoped.
*The numerous messages in the System event log are: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation." Event_ID 51.
Seeing the "D" on the end, and since I located my page file on that drive, I assumed that it was my "D:" drive starting to fail, not really noticing the "Harddisk2" in the middle of the message. Turns out that the "D" on the end is just noise, and that "Harddisk2" was my new Seagate 1TB FreeAgent USB-connected backup disk. It's configured to go to sleep when idle for 15 minutes and Windows would sometimes generate this error entry in the log when the drive would go away like that.
If it had generated the message every time it went to sleep, I might have noticed the 15 minute period of the messages, but I wasn't so lucky.
What drive letter does the Seagate 1Tb have on your system? Did you do a chkdsk /r on it and then see if the errors are still generated when it goes into sleep mode?
It's drive "G:" [E: and F: are DVD drives]. Doing a chkdsk /r on it doesn't seem to have had any effect. The error message pops up when there's no (intentional) activity on the drive, so Windows must be probing it periodically and finding that it's taken itself offline.
After doing a little digging, I found a little info in MS KB article 244780, which while not directly addressing the issue of USB drives going to sleep, does suggest (to me, anyway) that the message will be generated when unexpected things happen on USB-connected devices and that you can ignore them:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244780
However, the item that finally convinced me that the problem was the Seagate drive was the "Harddisk2" portion of the message; realizing that the count starts at zero, C: is Harddisk0, D: is Harddisk1 and G: is now Harddisk2.