external SATA doesn't boot properly

[klimowicz]

i have a 200GB SATA HDD in an external enclosure with all of my ripped cds and videos on it (i still own those cds, btw ), which is certainly over 100GB. about two months after i bought it, i noticed that when i switch it on after everything loads on my desktop PC, the LED at the front flashes red and green (green being the usual colour once it has booted). it would take about 5 minutes to boot, but once it has, it's fine.

recently, i have seen this boot time increase in length, and switching on the HDD before switching on the PC seemed to solve that problem, and in fact sped the boot time up considerably. but this morning, for the second time since i bought it, no joy whatsoever. it's been flashing red and green all the time, and i cannot access it.

my CPU fan was not spinning correctly, and i changed it this morning to a newer one in my old PC. i don't think this would have any bearing, as my IDE external drive works fine. I don't usually have both of them on at the same time, but they are both plugged into the front USB 2.0 ports so that i can disconnect them easily. I have tried to use another USB 2.0 port, rebooting the pc and i have uninstalled and re-installed the SATA drivers.

What would cause this? anything else i should try? should i get another SATA enclosure?

thanks in advance.

 

[Celegorm]

I Would check all the connections on the enclosure and on the computer. if all these are tight.

If the connections are good, try a new enclosure if you can. If this does not help, then its most likely your Hard drive is dieing.

 

[klimowicz]

thanks for the response, i forgot to mention that i can't always shut down either of my external drives before i shut down the PC. i don't switch the drive off unless i've stopped it from the desktop or the PC is off. could this be the problem? if so, why, and what can be done about shutting it down manually?

the 200GB drive is less than a year old, probably 10 months, my other 40GB drive was from my first PC about 3 years ago, and has never given me the same problem... hopefully it's not dying, it took me ages to put stuff onto it.

 

[Ocelot]

I have almost the exact same issue, only mine is a IDE Drive in an external enclouser.
One day I notice windows taking longer to boot than usual. Then I noticeded my external drive not showing on the drive tree. It is loading as an USB Mass storge device. But I can't acces the drive thru any means.
Also it I turn the drive off, Windows boots fast.

 

[klimowicz]

my problem isn't with windows, hopefully. i have 1.25GB RAM, so it boots very quickly in comparason to before. as i stated in the earlier post, up until today, switching on the drive before turning on the pc sped up the process... i fear it could indeed be the drive dying... mine isn't recognized at all...