Philips DVP 5990/37 HDD issue - need help

[badboo]

I had this player for well over two years now and it's been working great until 2 months ago.

Here is my setup/scenario:

I usually only use one external hard drive on this player.

Formerly (being a WIN XP user) I had no issues formatting the 320 GB Maxtor external hard drive as FAT32. The hard drive has it's own power supply.

I noticed that recently it took longer and longer for the 5990 to read the folders. Usually it was like 10 seconds. Now it takes about 20 seconds or more.

I only use 3 levels of folders and each folder has no more than 30 files in it.
I'm not sure about the total amount of files as I'm having the following problem:

In random folders I see abstract folder names and file names. I can not delete these files. They contain only weird ASCII symbols and not really proper alphabetic characters.

When I do a check on this drive (while connected to the PC) I get a message that there were errors which have been fixed. That "fix" results in not getting rid of these folders but finally corrupting more other files and folders. More stuff gets destroyed.

I'm now using Windows 7 and had a hard time figuring out how to format it until I found a command line program that "formatted" the 320 GB in like 2 seconds. No idea how that is supposed to work.

Anywho, I backup everything prior to re-formatting it (as much as I could) and copied the intact folders back on to the external HD.

Now after a couple days I'm running into the same problem again that I had before: corrupted files, weird folders and file names. Sometimes one TV show episode starts out fine and switches seamlessly into a movie that I deleted months ago.

What the hell is happening?

Any information is appreciated.

[Bodyslide]

Could it be that the Hard drive itself is having issues?

[cal_tony]

I had problems like that once from DriveSort. It didn't do a proper sort and it left some weird files and folders.

Tony

[badboo]

Could it be that the Hard drive itself is having issues?

Yeah that would be a logical conclusion.

For some reason there are files on the hard drive that play fine when hooked to the PC but some of them either don't play on the 5990 or are not even appearing in the folders.

The scrambled folders with the weird characters do not show up on the 5990 so it's just very confusing what files and folders are showing up where.

I have to run some diagnostic tools on the hard drive to see if the drive's going.

Are there any specific issues I have to look out for in order to determine if the drive's going bad?

[jagabo]

Run CHKDSK with a full surface scan.

If the drive is developing bad blocks in the root directory area, and is currently a single partition, you can avoid using that area by deleting the partition, creating a small partition (that will include the bad blocks) then creating a second partition that you will use. If the 5990 doesn't like having two partitions you can go back and delete the small partition. Or using an advanced partitioning program you can just start the partition away from the start of the drive.

Even if the above partitioning works, I'd be wary of the drive. Once a drive starts developing bad blocks the likelihood of more bad blocks is high. Make sure you have backups of all the important files.

[crixpit]

I had problems like that once from DriveSort. It didn't do a proper sort and it left some weird files and folders.

What do you use instead?

[badboo]

I had problems like that once from DriveSort. It didn't do a proper sort and it left some weird files and folders.

What do you use instead?

I was wondering what "DriveSort" is actually good for?

Is it a necessity to run that on a FAT32 formatted external HD for the 5990?

[Ai Haibara]

It's not a necessity, but the file browser in the 5990/5992 lists files according to the order they were added to the drive (FAT32 directory order), not alphanumerical order. I'll have to admit I usually just use a small USB pen drive with my 5990, so it doesn't bother me as much as it might if I had a long list of videos, but I do keep FolderSort around...

In other words, if you use one of the sorting utilities, you'll get the 'properly sorted' file list when you're viewing it on the player. Otherwise, it'll likely show up 'unsorted' (as above).

[badboo]

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.