How to repair an external Hard-Drive?

Question

I've been using my external USB (Iomegea 250GB) hard drive with standard configuration (1 Fat 32 partition) for a while. Now it started inventing new corrupted / losing existing files.

What should I do?

• Try to repair it? How?

• Back up data and then try to format it? Format in Fat32 again / in NTFS (I need exchange with Win computers)? With which options to make sure everything gets fixed?

So far I've gotten with Ubuntu:

mount
...
/dev/sdb1 on /media/iBackup type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_permissions)

and

sudo dosfsck -r -v /dev/sdb1
...
Currently, only 1 or 2 FATs are supported, not 0.

So far I've gotten after reboot with Win Xp:

chkdsk /F F:
...

and evereything works fine. Is there a linux way, though?

Answer 1

You might want to back everything up, and reformat it to fat32.

NTFS personally doesn't like me and randomly(I haven't found a way to reproduce properly) will lock me out of my Windows's OS drive; just have to umount and re-mount the drive.

If you want you could try NTFS partition, but I find using fat32 much easier because there is no permissions to worry about.

BTW: Make sure on both operating system's you 'safely remove drive' cause even though it is unlikely that could cause unwanted data on the disk, I've found.

(a nice GUI partitioning tool I use is Gparted.)