External HD possibly Dying?

[W@lly]

Hi all,

I would some help regarding an external 3.5inch USB2.0 Drive. It is a Freecom, 500GB in size.

This drive intermittently works and other times it gave me trouble. Then I have decided to remove its enclosure and install it to my PC via SATA [The brand of the drive is SAMSUNG HD501LJ]. This PC is currently running Windows 7 and decided to move the contents from this drive to another PATA drive in this PC.

Now the thing is I have files in it and cannot remove them, and when I tried chkdisk or the Windows 7 inbuilt checkdisk it does about 15mins and then stops. I retried checkdisk with various 3rd party tools [such as the Active @ Disk Monitor] and also removed the drive and did checkdisk with its' SATA to USB enclosure again, still it hangs after a certain amount of time.

I have also used Windows XP SP3 on other machine and even Linux Ubuntu to copy the files and then it hangs again!

All I can do is switch off the SATA to USB adapter and switch it on again [which is bad as it is a hard reset every time!] to move the files.

Also some files cannot be deleted, and thus why all software I tried is showing that it is healthy? It seems that the HD activity has a built-in timer to stop responding!

I have downloaded the SAMSUNG utility from their website as for its diagnostics and still hangs.

I have to copy it files before attempting to format it.

Can you help me in directing the right software to use?

Thanks