7/20/2005

Corrupt

I managed to corrupt the iView Media Pro catalog today. It's the fault of that stupid Maxtor One Touch external drive which has been a problem since I got it. Actually, probably not the fault of the drive either - just some combination of things that cause a "delayed write error" if I try to do too much with it at once. It's picky. Anyway, once the drive starts into it's delayed write message frenzy (lot's of popup boxes) - you know that something is going to get corrupted and this time it was the iView Catalog.

Fortunately I had a backup copy from two days ago of the corrupt catalog and that was a good thing. Losing the catalog is not a terrible thing unless you've spent a lot of time adding annotations to images. I do this but only to images that will end up in one of the html galleries.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dave, I had trouble with my One Touch drives until I started using the IEEE 1394 (firewire) connection. The USB connection was giving me the same errors.

I never figured out why, since firewire solved the issue.

Dave Beckerman said...

You might be on the right track since I sometimes have problems with other things that are connected via USB 2.0 BUT only when the ONE-TOUCH is connected. I'm not using a USB Hub, just two USB cards, but I have room for a firewire card. It would be great if that solved the problem for me.

Anonymous said...

I also have an external Maxtor, 40 gig and an external 160 gig internal Seagate in a USB case that makes it into an external USB 2.0. I have had problems with the Maxtor trying to write a lot of information. Two weeks ago I was using Windows Explorer to copy over my photos subdirectory. After writing very slowly the computer locked up. I attempted a warm re-boot and nothing happened. A cold re-boot would not take place. I ended up shutting off the power and unpluging the Maxtor from the USB 2.0 and it re-booted. I plugged in the maxtor and it worked. I no longer use the Maxtor to back-up my photos subdirectory. The Seagate does it with no problem.
It appears to be a write error as Dave suggested.
I will probably buy another external for USB 2.0 but not a maxtor. I am using the Maxtor for backup of text and other files now. Seagate may work better.

Anonymous said...

I have my external USB drives connected to USB 2.0 ports in the computer not via a USB Hub.
I think the Maxtor can't handle a lot of data transfers and causes write errors.

Anonymous said...

I have a couple friends that had a bunch of problems with the same drive as yours. Hooked up via USB 2.0. Bad drives I guess. I have 3 different external USB 2.0 drives or enclosures that I've yet to have a problem with, knock on wood.

Dave Beckerman said...

I also have a Western Digital 120 gig in an ADS drive enclosure which I've had much longer than the Maxtor and haven't had any problems with it (also connected by USB). I went through loads of info on the various boards and saw lots of explanations for the "delayed write errors" ranging from USB related to various registry settings - and made a few changes to the registry but nothing really helps.

If as Craig suggested, you are not doing a lot of data transfer, i.e. no big files - it works fine.

Also fascinating is that I went through the Maxtor site looking for "write-error" information in their Knowledge base, but it was nowhere to be found though this seems like a common problem.

One funny thing - when things go wrong -- well a while back I bought SysTweak is a pretty nice utility to do some registry cleaning up etc. and yesterday when I tried to launch it - it tells me that it is the demo version and that the trial period has expired - although I purchased the license key. I re-install, enter the key - and it still tells me that this is the demo version and that it has expired...

I go to their Knowledge base looking for information on this - and nothing.

I am convinced that the knowledge base idea is an oxymoronic term.