USB stick possbily causing disc errors?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Again it is me, thought id start a new thread for this one...

I notice that i only get the disc errors/event IDs 51 and 11, when my USB stick is inserted into the machine. I tested this theory on my lappy and indeed i checked the event viewer to find that again it shows me these errors, where i have never had it before in my laptop.
The stick is a San Cruzer sync 4gb stick, with that useless U3 crud on it.

Any thoughts?

 

Good idea sparko,

Should i keep the format to FAT32 for the stick if its possible to change to NTFS?

I ask as i usually mount the Stick to my Harddisk so programs show up as c:\program files\USB stick\,
possibly there may be a conflict between mounting a FAT32 usb key to a NTFS harddisk?

 

Fat32 was the only option along with FAT, so choose FAT32. Ill soon see if i still get disc errors, but im glad i found that i got disc errors when using the usb stick in both PC and LAppy...interesting...

 

If you turn off write caching for the USB drive in device manager you should be able to format the USB drive with NTFS.

 

Oh ok, will try that. Could the fact that i have the usb mounted on the c: and the fact that the stick is FAT32 be causing and showing as disc errors on the c:? When in actual fact it is an error with the stick?

The issue is...im not actually experiencing any noticable errors on my Primary hd, the only reason i know it has errors is because of the event viewer (ids 11 and 51).
I ran HD tune last night and it returned with results that ONE cube in the entire bajillion cubes of the "health check", (quite similar to the defrag interface), was red. Which means it has an error.

I ran a check on my second HD too...(hard drive which has the C: clone one it) and it states the "spin retry count" is at a near critical value.

I think for now i will just continue using the Primary drive, and not install anything new on that drive. The whole of my C: is backed up including programs onto my 2nd HD and will use the second drive for any new installations, so in the case of a failure of the 1st drive, ill still have everything. Exuse my ramblings...but just trying to figure out in my own mind what to do..

 

I think its very likely that the errors are due to mixed format types, NTFS and FAT32. If you mounted the USB drive in an empty NTFS folder it will be seen as part of the same volume (I thought both drives had to be in NTFS to do this, or have I got the wrong end of the stick?). NTFS marks bad sectors on the disk and doesn’t use them for storage, so don’t worry about data loss other than a physical failure of the drive, you have a good backup so all angles are covered. If the drives are similar and your motherboard supports RAID you could mirror the two, instant backup....

 

IThurts,

Here's a link for a webpage called "Information about Event ID 51." It also mentions something about Event ID 11.

Link:

1. Information about Event ID 51 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244780

 

So are you saying that if the USB is FAT32 and the HD is NTFS, as long as the USB is mounted inside the NTFS drive, that it will be "seen" as NTFS? Or is that not the case?

Also, how do i go about mirroring the two drives for instant backup? Could you elaborate if its not much trouble?
Thanks buddy,

 

Thanks for that handy link...rep given.

 

The USB drive will be seen as whatever its formatted in, what I’m saying is that its probably not best to mix file systems when you are trying to mount one drive in another. Best keep to NTFS. Using FAT32 on a separate partition would be fine.

RAID 1, or mirroring is where two hard drives (the same make and model ideally) are joined in a way that the second drive contains a mirror image of the first. When data is written to the disk its written to both at the same time. If one fails, the second can be used to boot the PC or can be used as a slave in a second machine to get the data off. It saves you having to manually backup data (but for each pair of hard drives you only get the use of the space on one of them). I have a three disk RAID 5 array in my PC for all my data, although the OS is on a single disk at the moment.

Can your PC do RAID? Depends, most motherboards these days have the feature built-in where the Southbridge can RAID the drives, what’s your PC? Need to google for the spec.

 

its custom built...the mobo is asus striker extreme. i think i can live with manually backing up every now and again though, so dont google too hard

back to my task though...i think i will try to format the stick in NTFS format, how do i disable write caching as u mentioned to enable the stick to be formatted using NTFS?

 

Your mobo has onboard RAID, so you could go down that route. Good choice by the way, I have just fitted an Asus P5K Premium/WiFi-AP in my machine, its a beast. Did a little light overclock on my FSB to bring my 2.4Ghz C2D up to 2.6Ghz. Runs nice and stable, CPU core temps at 40 degrees C on a full load, anyway, I digress...

Plug your USB drive in, head over to device manager and go into it’s properties. Write caching is on the Policies tab (in Vista, probably the same tab in XP, not sure what OS your running). Change the setting and apply it, then go in to My Computer and try the format again.

 

Thanks Nightwalker, i did as suggested however, i did not have a policies tab for my usb stick. It doesnt matter though as i have decided that there is no real need to mount the stick in any case. have removed the mount and am simply using the stick in its default plug and play mode.

I noticed again last night i had no disc errors whilst the stick wasnt in, i wasnt really doing anything that would strain the hard disk though, just internet and event viewer etc..
I then plugged the stick in, and about 5-10 mins later, i receive disc errors ids 11,51 again.

Its driving me crazy, because the disc errors arent actually doin me pc any harm as far as i can tell, but the warnings are still present now and again and it just bugs me.

That link provided above to MS, suggested that these errors are most likely to do with a device attached to a controller, so i think im on the rite track. Might replace my friggn USB stick.

 

Just so im clear on this..would it be the USB stick itself causing an error...or the controller it is attached to?

 

could be either. but didnt you say that the errors occurred on a different machine? so what does logic dictate in that case?

 

Ok mate...no need to be a smart guy...i forgot i had tested on another machine thats all..

 

not trying to be smart, im trying to prompt you into correct thinking for problem resolution. I dont want to give you the answer, I want to outfit you with the capability to find the answer yourself.

 

yes very good...your a real logical techincian.