Lockup in Windows XP

[beck538]

I am using the latest Retrospect Pro 7.6.123, Windows XP, fully up to date, backing up to a Maxtor OneTouch III 1 TB drive, Firewire connecton. Recently, my drive became nearly full and Retrospect simply hung the computer, no errors, no log files that I could find. So, I cleaned out the external drive, re-defined my backup sets and tried again. It is locking up again. How can I diagnose this problem? There are no error messages displayed. When I return to the computer after a backup starts, the Retrospect window is up, progress bar has moved about 10% to 30% of the way across, but nothing is happening and nothing responds, I have to warm boot the machine. i am pretty sure the drive itself is OK.

[ethier]

Have you tried to re-format the drive after your PC locked up? It is possible there could be come corrupt data on the drive now.

 

After you format the drive use Windows to copy some large files to the drive to make sure it's okay. If the drive came with diagnostic utilities try running those to completion to make sure there are no errors.

 

It wouldn't be the first time a new drive went bad no matter who made the drive.

 

If all that is okay, I would try Retro again and see what happens.

[beck538]

Thanks for the reply. First, the drive itself is almost 2 years old. I have not tried a full re-format, but I did run the Seagate utilities on it, and that did report an error. A second run of a more powerful utility that allows marking bad sectors just ran last night, and I am currently trying to re-run the Retrospect backup, I will report back how that goes.

 

But, my point is still important: as this all started to happen, I got no error logging from Retrospect that helped me in any way, my computer just locked up requiring a warm re-boot. It would be nice to see a log of the fact that it had trouble writing to the disk, what file it stopped on, and the stop time. AND, it would be nice if it actually stopped, and did not lock up my computer!!