dumping large partition to USB drive fails

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 05:11:23PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> Well, camcontrol didn't work either. :-(

This doesn't come as much of a surprise; camcontrol expects to talk to a
native SCSI device (your drive is ATA).  atacontrol expects to talk to a
native ATA device, but via adXX, not via umass or any other USB interface.

I don't know of any software even on Windows (for comparison) that lets
you get SMART stats off of an ATA drive in a USB enclosure via USB.

> These ones are relatively easy to disassemble, luckily. I have two
> enclosures of the same brand, but the older (malfunctioning) one has
> both USB 2 and firewire connections, while the newer one just has a USB 2
> connection. See http://www.conceptronic.nl/site/desktopdefault.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=200&Cat=60&grp=6010&ar=450&Prod_ID=1393&Prod=CHD3UL
> 
> I'll disassemble the malfunctioning drive, put  it in an old PC and run
> smartctl on it. Are there any other tests that might be worthwhile?

Try a different manufacturer's product and see if it has the same
problem?  Many of these external enclosure products are badly (read:
cheaply) engineered.  Here's a story:

A co-worker of mine owned one which kept dropping off the bus randomly,
and when it was on the bus, it would occasionally error out during a
transfer.

Upon opening the enclosure (and violating the warranty), I found that
the 2" long ATA33 cable (which was amusing in itself since the device
claimed to support ATA100/ATA133 speeds) connecting the drive to the
ATA<->USB backplane had a couple copper wires exposed, and two of the
wire crimping pins were actually sticking outside of the 40-pin
connector.

I replaced the 2" ATA33 cable with the shortest ATA66 cable I could
find (about 6"), which took some work folding it inside such a small
space (and probably not good for the copper!) -- and it worked.  All
the problems were fixed, and the drive throughput nearly doubled.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |