Thanks John.

The drive did come with WD Diagnostic software and I ran it. It reported too 
many bad sectors after running for about an hour so I guess I'll just be 
safe and replace the drive.

Joe


--------------------------------------------------
From: "John Sproule" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 1:27 AM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Cyclical Redundancy Check Errors external hard drive

> Joe,
>
> I would visit the WD web site, download their Data Lifeguard Diagnostic 
> for Windows, and run it to see whether there are any obvious problems with 
> your external drive.  If the drive comes up clean, you might consider 
> using the write zeros to the drive option, instead of just reformatting 
> it.  I don't know if this drive comes with any software that you were 
> using.  If it does, you'll need to download and reinstall it to the drive, 
> after wiping it and reformatting.
>
> Of course, if the drive isn't physically damaged, the question remains of 
> why your files were corrupted.  I'm afraid I can't come up with anything 
> off-hand, based on what you've provided.
>
> Hope this is helpful.
>
> John Sproule
>
> --------------- Original Message Below -------------
>
> Date:    Thu, 13 May 2010 12:30:14 -0400
> From:    Joe Trimarchi <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Cyclical Redundancy Check Errors external hard drive
>
> I have an external WD MyBook 500 GB drive connected to my Dell desktop via 
> USB 2. I've been using it as a backup for my pictures. Yesterday I noticed 
> SyncToy reported some CRC errors and sure enough I couldn't open those 
> files. I ran chkdsk and it added 541 clusters to the bad clusters file. It 
> corrected errors and shows a total of 2164 KB in bad sectors. Obviously 
> some files were lost and I've now copied everything off the drive back to 
> my Desktop.
>
> My questions are, should I replace the drive? It is only about 1 1/2 years 
> old and I only paid about $90 for it at Costco. Or should I reformat it or 
> just leave it the way chkdsk left it? I'm seriously thinking of replacing 
> it with 2 external drives keeping duplicate backups.
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