Western Digital passport drive problem

Here at the office I work at, I plugged a new western digital passport drive into the server and started a backup using the ntbackup command. This was after everyone had left for the day.

This morning I come in and the server has an error that I improperly removed a USB device. The backup reported an error that there was not enough room - there is 230 gigs free on the drive.

I'am going to guess that something happened and the drive disconnected from the server for some reason. Not physically disconnected - but software wise.

Does anyone have a western digital passport drive and have you had any problems with it?

 

Well, I figured out what "part" of the problem is. The drive is formatted the FAT32 file system. As I'am backing up the server, when the backup file hits 4.2 - 4.4 gigs, that is the largest file size supported by FAT32.

I backed the server up with another passport drive that was formatted with the NTFS file system. And that worked fine. That is because NTFS can support files larger the 4 gigs. But FAT32 can not.

The solution is to format the passport drive to NTFS, which I am doing now.

 

Did they shipped it with FAT32? If so, that is a bad call on Western Digital's part.

No one should be using FAT32 anymore. The days of DOS and 16 BIT OSes are over. Get with the times people.

 

Yes, the passport drive shipped from the factory with FAT32 on it. I did not do anything to it except take it out of the box and plug it in.

At home, I still use fat32 on my operating system drives. When you do a fresh install of windows 2000 from a DOS prompt, the install script can not see the NTFS partition. To install windows 2000 from a DOS start up disk, the drive had to be formatted to FAT32, then convert to NTFS after windows 2000 was installed. For some reason the DOS install script of windows 2000 could not see a NTFS partition.


And, I had windows 98 installed to play some old DOS based games that will not run under XP. At one time my home computer was triboot - windows 98, windows 2000 and windows XP. Now I mainly use XP.

I agree that there is no real reason for the passport drive to be formatted to FAT32. Unless the company wanted it to work with windows 98.

I have very specific reasons why I still use FAT32 on one of my drives. The other 2 drives in my computer are NTFS.

At work, all systems are formatted to NTFS.

 

I can't beleive they shipped you a FAT32 drive, was it an older model or something?

 

It was bought from wal-mart 2 months ago.

 

Could very well be an older model than. Wal-mart gives consumers lower prices by selling a lot of out of season merchandise. This especially holds true with many of their electronics which might be last year's model or were purchased as overstock.

 

The drive was formatted to NTFS, so the file size is not an issue anymore. And dang it if I am not still having problems. Windows 2000 server keeps saying the drive is being removed from the system.

This is an external USB 250 gig passport drive. Windows is reporting that the drive is being unplugged. I do not understand what the problem is. A Seagate passport drive did not have these problems, its just the western digital.

So if your looking at buying a passport drive, stay away from western digital. In my opinion, Seagate is going to give you a lot less problems.

 

Could be a loose or bad power supply. Switch cords with a known working drive and see what happens.

 

There is no power supply - expect on the server. All of the power is sent through the USB cable.

 

I realize that there is no external powersupply...

But you say it is losing the device. This could be because of a bad cable or a bad connection in the device. By switching cables with a known working device for a period of time, you can eliminate one of those. Than you can send the device to Western Digital for servicing.

 

It may have something to do with windows server 2000. Yesterday evening I plugged the device into an XP pro workstation - its a fax software application server sitting in the server room.

This morning I check the workstation - no errors and everything is fine. To get a backup of the server, I created a shared folder on the XP workstation, backed up to that folder and now I'am moving the backup file to the passport drive.

But its strange that the Seagate drive worked fine on the windows 2000 server, but the western digital has problems. And the western digital works fine on the XP Pro computer.

 

Could be Windows 2000's lack of native USB 2.0 support. Maybe the Seagate downgrades or just plain supports USB 1.1 on older OSes.

Native USB 2.0 support wasn't added to Windows until XP SP2. Means it would be in Windows Server 2003 but not 2000.

 

So there might be some kind of conflict between windows 2000 server USB 1, and the western digital USB 2.

Maybe the western digital USB chipset can not step down to USB 1, or can not detect that the computer can only run at USB 1. That might explain why it does just fine on a newer HP computer with XP Pro service pack 2.

While the seagate can detect the difference and steps down to USB 1.

That makes sense.