That is more or less what I thought, but since the drive seemed to work alright until I transferred allot of data, I wasn't so sure. In the last effort, I did a low level format, and then copied about 1GB of data onto the drive. Then I restarted and check disk ran. It found some errors, fixed them, and then finished. On subsequent restarts, check disk didn't run, so I thought I was in the clear. I was able to open files and use apps in the data I had copied. Then I copied about 50GB more data and restarted. The same check disk cycle started, but this time it wouldn't finish. After restart, some of the original 1GB of data was corrupted and those apps would fail to run. There are many variables here, so the logical thing to do would be to try to insure that the fault was not in the data being moved. The problem is that the data is on a drive with bad sectors, but it works in the main. Check disk does not run on every start up when that drive is in the machine, which it should if the source file system is really borked.

This is a problem that is proving difficult to diagnose. There are two other platter drives and an SSD in this box and they are not acting up at all. This leads me to believe that the new drive is just bad. The fact that the drive passes WDs diagnostic software makes that a bit less clear. Memory, the motherboard sata controller, sata cables, power supply, operating system, etc, are all other places where the problem could reside. In most of those cases, I would expect the problem to be more wide spread. I moved the drive off of the motherboard sata controller and onto a brand new PCI sata card in case the controller was going.

Is this something that I could do in windows cygwin, or would a flavor of linux be better. I have Cent and Ubuntu on one computer here. I have some live linux CDs, but the computers I could use those on are number crunching servers that don't have space for hard drives. Another issue is that once I have moved data onto these drives, when I delete the partition, I can't create a new one with a quick format. After this blew up again last night, I deleted the partition on the drive. When I replaced it, windows couldn't format the new partition. The format failed. This happened before and I had to do a low level format to get it back. That takes about 6 hours, so it's not a trivial step.

Yea, I'm not sure. I know that I get OS messages about corrupt files from time to time. I guess you could try to open the file with the default app and that would trigger some exceptions if the file is bad. I guess you could try chown or chmod, I have got some error messages about this not working on files when they may be bad. Anything like that would take forever.

At this point, I am inclined to RMA the drive (I have an open ticket on it) and do the dd_rescue copy with the new drive. What do you think about that?

LMHmedchem