Hello friends I need some help with a problem that start yesterday.

My external disk where I have some video files start to freeze every each 2 seconds when play a video that I open with vlc, gnome-player.

I try to use tesdisk to try to find any problem.

But When I have the testdisk in terminal running on top of disk partition with a work to search for bad sectors, if I open the disk partition and open a video the problem of freeze video play each 2 seconds disappear, but when I stop testdisk the problem appear.

I cant figure what can be the problem in theory if is the partition then I cant open it and I can without any problem , and if is a problem of conection of disk supply (it uses only the usb cable to usb port on pc dont have external supply) when I open the video with testdisk work in the disk at same time should be cause more freezing or not?

When checking a Linux file system on a disk, it should not be mounted - other than that, have you tried increasing the video cache(?).

Yes I already take a look on the cache, I use this disk and others so many time, I test play video files from my other disk devices externals and all of them works normal.

In this case I can use the disk on the pcmanfm when the tesdisk works on terminal and check the partition.

I cant understand what can be the problem maybe is a hardware supply power problem on disk is the only thing that I can imagine but he works normally I can open files like videos but play with a freeze every 2 seconds - .avi, .mp4 ... if I open a image I can open but if I pass to other image on the same directory of the disk directly from the image viewer he needs some seconds to pass from one image to other.

All of the mentioned disappear if I open terminal do commad tesdisk and put the disk to search for errors on partition, when he do it the video files dont freeze and the image pictures change dont have any lag.

I dont specify the partition type is ntfs, I already try ntsffix and he works well but never change.

HPFS - NTFS 0 32 33 121601 57 56 1953521664 [TOSHIBA EXT]

Image from the work of testdisk that I do now to test the disk - analyse cylinder

https://postimg.cc/r0fTdSK5


Thanks.

Since your filesystem on that partition is ntfs, you should use windows software (chkdsk) to check the filesystem for errors. ntfsfix will only repair very minor problems.

Is the disk mounted via USB2 or USB3. There is a distinct difference in the power available as well as data transfer rate between those. I recommend always using USB3, but some don't.

As already stated, if it is a filesystem error, which is possible, then the drive should be attached to a windows machine and checked using chkdisk.

May be it's power saving gone crazy? Does any type of simultaneous disk access - e.g. copying another file, resolves this issue, or just testdisk? Can you see SMART information for this disk? - some USB enclosures let you do it, some don't. If yes, check the start/stop count, does it grow rather rapidly? An, of course, check for other SMART issues. As a palliative you may try increasing video player disk cache: mpv definitely can do it and I believe vlc also has a similar option.

I dont have any machine with windows all my computers are with Linux.

Any alternative ?

Do you think that this can be a problem of power supply to the disk and I need to buy another, it uses only usb dont have any option to external power supply (I have other disks like this and dont have problem on the ports of this pc so the problem is with this disk but I cant imagine what I need to do).

Thanks.

Try checking the drives SMART data. Not all USB drives are compatible. The drive could be failing .

Check the output of the dmesg command. Do you see errors for the USB drive?

Only basic NTFS filesystem errors can be fixed on linux. This is why you might need to run chkdsk.

I test the disk on the usb 3.0 ports and in the usb 2.0 the problem is the same.

I'll put the dmesg return →

At now I run this command
[sudo badblocks -nv /dev/sdb1]
that I see here → https://askubuntu.com/questions/4034...n-output-now-w

I'll test smartmontools after → https://www.tecmint.com/check-linux-...rs-bad-blocks/

I suspect that this has NOTHING to do with your problem, but if you run no Windows why are you using an external disk formatted with a Windows file system?

Its a mistake that I commit in past with this disk, when I buy the disk the first thing I try to did it was format this to ext 4 and I did witho tool like disk utility but for some reason the format dont work, and I only see and know this fact when I open the disk with disk utility later in time so unfortanetly I only know this after I aready move many files for the disk and the partition format is ntfs I unknow why when I format this to ext 4 with disk utility in Linux it seems work but the type of partition dont change.

If I understand your post, the partition ID type is just a label and not part of the filesystem itself.

The dmesg output does not show the drive being assigned a device ID anything about its partitions. Can you still access the drive?

Yes of course I ca access copy move and delete files on the disk

This is the device → Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0480:a00c Toshiba America Inc

You can see the picture I open gparted with the partition as you can see there arent any message with some wrong on her structure.

https://i.postimg.cc/ZqntzgKW/2021-0...1024-scrot.png

The command smartontools reported nothing problems with partition

The partition ID was ntfs so formatting it to ext4 failed because the partiton type (ID) was not changed. Ext4 and ntfs have different signatures on the disk and the partition signature is what is used to identify and manage the filesystem on that partition and is read when the filesystem is mounted.

If you have enough available space I would recommend temporarily removing (or doing a backup) of all the files on that drive. You then could use gparted or similar to set it as ext4 and reformat it, and restore the data. This likely would also handle the (possible) bad block issue.

Your smartctl commands have to be run on the device, not the partition, so if you change that to "sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb" it would work properly.

2 members found this post helpful.