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I have a Seagate Backup Plus Drive connected via USB to my Windows 10 computer. I use it to save my backup files from Macrium home. After my computer has been in sleep mode and then restarted, I find that backups usually fail. I can use windows explorer to look at the drive, and all is OK except for a few folders, and double-clicking one gives the message "S: is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." Some other folders and files are available normally. Replugging the USB cable solves the problem until the next sleep.

What in the heck is going on? Is this Windows or Seagate?

When this problem first appeared, the S: drive would sometimes not be present in windows explorer at all after a sleep. Seagate told me to disable a power-saving option (where was that?) which seems to have changed the symptoms to the current situation.

Error shown in windows explorer

Edit: 2/3/22: I/O error again. Tried:

C:\Users\rw>chkdsk /R s:
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

Huh? Contrary to my claim above, I found that some folders are accessible but several others are not. Disk Management shows a healthy NTFS Basic Data Partition.

Replugged USB, and chkdsk is now running happily. ETA: 63:41:36 :(

I wonder if there is some kind of cache on the drive which gets corrupted during sleep cycles, leading to the problem. Restarting the drive then corrects it.

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  • Seagate support tells me to use their "Toolkit" software instead. ........ Did you do this? and did you test the drive? The drive may be dying.
    – anon
    Commented Feb 1, 2022 at 17:05
  • This is a nearly new drive, and it works perfectly after I cycle the power or USB connection. Toolkit is much less capable than Macrium, and it hasn't supplied a backup yet. Perhaps at 9:30 today :)
    – rich
    Commented Feb 1, 2022 at 17:19
  • Can you return it for a warranty replacement? We have had USB drives fail, but if not failing, they run without errors.
    – anon
    Commented Feb 1, 2022 at 17:23
  • Even though you already have folders with longer names/capital letters etc, use capital letters and don't go over 8 characters, just for this folder?
    – JohnnyVegas
    Commented Feb 1, 2022 at 17:42
  • longshot: the sleep state interrupted macrium and the folder lock was not properly released or the macrium service simply failed to release handles/locks
    – Yorik
    Commented Feb 1, 2022 at 17:46

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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It's more of a workaround - I have had this before with other folders. What you need to do is to uncheck the following USB power saving option within device manager for all your USB hubs on your computer - I have several, but you may only have a few.

usb powermanagement

The downside of this will be that the USB disk will stay powered, but at least you will have a backup strategy that works.

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  • 1
    That's worth a try. Viewing things by connection, I see four hubs on the way to my drive. I'll just do those four instead of all 14 :)
    – rich
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 0:47
  • Nope, turning off power saving didn't work. This morning, the S: drive is completely missing from file explorer and the device manager. And Seagate Toolbox hasn't gotten me a backup yet, either :( Maybe it's time to bug Seagate again. Or should I take the drive back to Costco?
    – rich
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 17:22
  • can you change power management to high performance and shut off screen only? If this works then we can drill down into more power management stuff to make it less wasteful
    – JohnnyVegas
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 19:38
  • I assume you mean my computer power management. It's been set to "Samsung High Performance" which I guess I got with my SSD. And then you want me to never put my computer to sleep? When I'm away for hours, I'd rather let my four hard drives have a rest. It never sleeps automatically, I select shut down/sleep manually. I sometimes have several projects open, and would rather not shut down. I recently changed USB ports and it will be a day or two before I can report back. BTW, FWIW: If I try to sleep while Macrium is doing a backup, it won't sleep.
    – rich
    Commented Feb 2, 2022 at 21:40
  • Your drive has separate power management built in, but must be turned off - You need to download a utility - seagate.com/gb/en/support/kb/…
    – JohnnyVegas
    Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 21:20
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You need to do a

Replace C: with the actual drive letter.

chkdsk /R c:

You might have bad sectors lurking in the allocation units of said folder.

This will take hours, best to do it overnight

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  • I've edited to show results. I've also removed Macrium because it's not looking like they are responsible.
    – rich
    Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 23:55
  • @rich The question is when you plug it in again do you hear the motor spin up? This is beginning to sound like the motor in your drive is failing, and you will have to replace the drive if this is the case.
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 14:03
  • After I restore power to the drive, it spins up and works perfectly. I ran chkdsk /R most of the day yesterday; it finished the files and was working on the free clusters. No problems found. I shut it down when I got a hot warning. 123 degrees was it? It's 91 now.
    – rich
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 21:30
  • @rich Here's the problem, when the drive motor starts to fail it just gets worse. First, it will a week or more between issues, but eventually require unplugging and replugging daily. At that point you better order a new hard drive ASAP because the motor could 100% fail at any time.
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 6, 2022 at 16:52

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