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From: sobriquet on 5 Feb 2010 14:34
Hi.

I have several WD mybook essential USB drives and I'd like to check
them on my 64 bit vista system.
So I've downloaded winDLG from the WD website, but somehow I can't
check my drive using that program.
Chdk from windows finds bad clusters on one of the drives, so now I'm
worried about the other drives and
it takes very long to check them.
When I run winDLG, it doesn't seem to recognize any physical drives
(just logical volumes), and hence I can't check a specific physical
drive.

Is there an alternative program similar to winDLG that will allow me
to check external USB drives without logging off the system?

Greetings and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek
From: sobriquet on 5 Feb 2010 19:52
On Feb 5, 8:34 pm, sobriquet <dohduh...(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I have several WD mybook essential USB drives and I'd like to check
> them on my 64 bit vista system.
> So I've downloaded winDLG from the WD website, but somehow I can't
> check my drive using that program.
> Chdk from windows finds bad clusters on one of the drives, so now I'm
> worried about the other drives and
> it takes very long to check them.
> When I run winDLG, it doesn't seem to recognize any physical drives
> (just logical volumes), and hence I can't check a specific physical
> drive.
>
> Is there an alternative program similar to winDLG that will allow me
> to check external USB drives without logging off the system?
>
> Greetings and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek

Oh, I see the problem was most likely that I didn't run the program in
administrator mode under vista.

But I've tried it out with multiple computers, multiple cables and
multiple external drives, and I get a "Cable Test::Write sector
error!" just about every time under vista.
This happens on at least 3 different vista computers, but the problem
doesn't seem to occur under xp.

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics, v. 1.17.

I have bad sectors on a My Book Essential Edition 2.0 (2 TB) drive,
less than half a year old. So I thought it was a good idea to check
all my WD USB drives.
From: Yousuf Khan on 5 Feb 2010 20:53
sobriquet wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I have several WD mybook essential USB drives and I'd like to check
> them on my 64 bit vista system.
> So I've downloaded winDLG from the WD website, but somehow I can't
> check my drive using that program.
> Chdk from windows finds bad clusters on one of the drives, so now I'm
> worried about the other drives and
> it takes very long to check them.
> When I run winDLG, it doesn't seem to recognize any physical drives
> (just logical volumes), and hence I can't check a specific physical
> drive.
>
> Is there an alternative program similar to winDLG that will allow me
> to check external USB drives without logging off the system?
>
> Greetings and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek

I found that HDSentinel usually works with most USB-connected external
drives, and I specifically tested it with a friend's WD Mybook 500GB. I
just don't know if HDSentinel has a 64-bit version or not, I would
assume it does. Ah I see by the system requirements page that it does
support 64-bit Vista:

Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel.php?page=requirements

Yousuf Khan
From: sobriquet on 5 Feb 2010 22:32
On 6 feb, 02:53, Yousuf Khan <bbb...(a)spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote:
> sobriquet wrote:
> > Hi.
>
> > I have several WD mybook essential USB drives and I'd like to check
> > them on my 64 bit vista system.
> > So I've downloaded winDLG from the WD website, but somehow I can't
> > check my drive using that program.
> > Chdk from windows finds bad clusters on one of the drives, so now I'm
> > worried about the other drives and
> > it takes very long to check them.
> > When I run winDLG, it doesn't seem to recognize any physical drives
> > (just logical volumes), and hence I can't check a specific physical
> > drive.
>
> > Is there an alternative program similar to winDLG that will allow me
> > to check external USB drives without logging off the system?
>
> > Greetings and thanks in advance for any suggestions, Niek
>
> I found that HDSentinel usually works with most USB-connected external
> drives, and I specifically tested it with a friend's WD Mybook 500GB. I
> just don't know if HDSentinel has a 64-bit version or not, I would
> assume it does. Ah I see by the system requirements page that it does
> support 64-bit Vista:
>
> Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoringhttp://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel.php?page=requirements
>
>         Yousuf Khan

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/11-Cable-Test-Write-Sector-Error/td-p/4238;jsessionid=CF30CF9E228CDB6C32E9C3970A5ECCDA

Seems like it's a common problem. The WD diagnostics software is
supposedly compatible with vista (both 32 and 64 bit), according to
its documentation (online pdf).

I was thinking perhaps I should try seatools first as an alternative
diagnostics utility, as it's affiliated with a major brand of
harddisks (seagate)

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=seatools-win&vgnextoid=552bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
From: Franc Zabkar on 6 Feb 2010 05:02
On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 11:34:37 -0800 (PST), sobriquet
<dohduhdah(a)yahoo.com> put finger to keyboard and composed:

>Is there an alternative program similar to winDLG that will allow me
>to check external USB drives without logging off the system?

Have you tried HDDScan for Windows?
http://hddscan.com/

.... or smartmontools (Linux/Windows):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
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