I have an old internal IDE hard drive that needs to be tested. I used an IDE-to-USB adapter to connect it to a USB port on a Windows PC. Then I tried using GSmartControl to execute the Short SMART self-test on the drive, and that worked fine. Then I tried multiple times to execute an Extended SMART self-test on the drive, and each time it would run for 3-15 minutes before returning an "Interrupted (host reset)" error. I tried running the Extended SMART self-test using SpeedFan and got the same error.
I thought perhaps it was an issue with the USB port going to sleep. In Device Manager, I noticed all of my "USB Root Hub" devices had the "Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power" option checked. I unchecked all of them and rebooted. But the Extended self-tests still returned "Interrupted (host reset)".
I came across a similar question on this site. Apparently the drive can go into standby during the Extended self-test which causes the "Interrupted (host reset)" error. The answers on that question suggest to periodically access the drive during the test - but they are UNIX-based solutions.
How can I periodically access the drive in Windows? When the drive is connected, it does not get a drive letter assigned to it. The drive was taken out of a RAID setup, so Windows does not recognize it. Disk Management shows the drive but says it has an "Unknown" format.
