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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
Posted 2018-11-19T15:33:04.890
Reputation: 1 155
Why don't you format the disk so it gets a proper drive letter? – harrymc – 2018-11-19T21:07:34.910
@harrymc Because the PC that disk came from had a file system problem and I want to scan the disk to make sure there are no bad sectors. I do not want to lose the data on the disk. – pacoverflow – 2018-11-19T21:53:59.193
If you have problems with S.M.A.R.T. (which is in any case somewhat limited on IDE-to-USB), you could try a conventional disk test scan. – harrymc – 2018-11-20T07:32:43.263
I ended up using the UBCD Live CD which has gsmartcontrol on it. I guess it's not possible to read from a drive in Windows if it doesn't have a drive letter assigned to it? – pacoverflow – 2018-11-24T19:05:38.343