I could really use some help here!

I'm a photographer and shoot digitally. Lately I've run into a problem where jpg and raw files stored on external drives go bad.

My normal process is to dump files to my internal C drive, and once they're edited, store them to an external drive hooked up via firewire.

They're fine on the C drive...I can open them up, process them, etc, no problem.

What's happening is that files on the external drives are getting corrupted. I'll open them up and photoshop will say they're truncated. It doesn't happen to all the images, but enough for me to start doubting the integrity of my storage methods, which scares the crap out of me.

Here's an example. Tonight I processed a bunch of RAW files into jpgs. Then I ran the jpgs through a program that creates HTML pages.

The html pages look fine. The program was able to read the files and create the html.

However I decided to go back and edit a few of the jpgs, photoshop said they were truncated.

I'm using windows XP. I've had the problem on different external drives, but they've all been firewire drives.

I don't think I've had the problem on USB drives.

Help!

tom

Look in the device manager and see if you have any red or yellow warning icons in any category.

If you do, delete the devices and let Windows install them again using the latest drivers.

I dosn't see why there should be a difference between an external USB drive and a Firewire drive other than the drivers in the controllwers of hubs.

I use an external usb drive and have never had any problem with pics I stored on it.

Maybe it has something to do with the html converter ap accessing these files, possibly changing them when it accesses them.

These are some signs of a bad harddrive...

Question... Do you move your Harddrive a lote?