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I have an old internal IDE hard drive that needs to be tested. I used an IDE-to-USB adapter to connect it to a USB port on a Windows PC. Then I tried using GSmartControl to execute the Short SMART self-test on the drive, and that worked fine. Then I tried multiple times to execute an Extended SMART self-test on the drive, and each time it would run for 3-15 minutes before returning an "Interrupted (host reset)" error. I tried running the Extended SMART self-test using SpeedFan and got the same error.

I thought perhaps it was an issue with the USB port going to sleep. In Device Manager, I noticed all of my "USB Root Hub" devices had the "Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power" option checked. I unchecked all of them and rebooted. But the Extended self-tests still returned "Interrupted (host reset)".

I came across a similar question on this site. Apparently the drive can go into standby during the Extended self-test which causes the "Interrupted (host reset)" error. The answers on that question suggest to periodically access the drive during the test - but they are UNIX-based solutions.

How can I periodically access the drive in Windows? When the drive is connected, it does not get a drive letter assigned to it. The drive was taken out of a RAID setup, so Windows does not recognize it. Disk Management shows the drive but says it has an "Unknown" format.

pacoverflow
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1 Answers1

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FWIW, this does not answer your question directly, however:

To test such a drive it may be a better idea to run a scan you can control and that allows you to see if there are issues with the drive (unreadable sectors), and if so how many there are and where they are.

Using something like 'HD Tune', or 'Victoria for Windows', or 'PC3000 Disk Analyzer' you can get a pretty good understanding about the condition of a drive and gives you more control that when relying on the drive's built-in long test.

pc3000 disk analyzer is made by company that produces pro grade data recovery tools

Whether the drive is assigned a drive letter or not is irrelevant.