Can anyone solve this mistery?

[DanW]

I recently bought a WD5000AAKS and I can't seem to reliably get it working with my system. I ended up sending the first drive back, which was found faulty, and got a replacement.

I'm really hoping the replacement isn't also damaged, windows doesn't detect it on boot, in fact it seems to time out when looking for the drive on boot up, but the BIOS can see it fine and detects it's SMART values fine.

I've been able to format it via, Windows, Linux (Kubuntu) and Partition Magic.
I've also formatted it using a SATA to USB converter and it worked ok, but dropped out once or twice when copying data across.

Strange thing is windows will detect it if the drive is not plugged in at boot-up and is then plugged in.
Linux came across a really strange problem, something about a corrupt cache. I'm hoping it just got it nickers in a twist and was lieing about that, because surely that can't be a good thing...

I've tired using Western Digital's Life Guard Tools to no avail.

If anyone could suggest I'm doing something wrong, that I should be partitioning the drives into 20gb strips Razz or just get a refund?


Cheers,
Dan

[Anonymous]

I would get a refund and try a different drive, sometimes you get unknown compatability issues, so maybe this is just one of them, or it might be another faulty drive.

[DanW]

hmmm looks like some kind of incompatibility issue. I took it to work and plugged it into one of the new Dell 745s and it worked fine...

Is it going to make any difference at all which make of HDD I have, or is it likely that none of the 500gb drives are going to play ball?

Is it worth hassle and time of getting my motherboard sent back considering I can't do anything the BIOS end as it's already got the latest BIOS update?


Thanks,
Dan

[Anonymous]

[Removed at the request of the author]

[DanW]

I am not sure what you intend to use the drive for, but you might be better off with 2x250GB drives in RAID array..? Personally I would recommend any of the Seagate Barracuda discs, the 7200.10 are highly praised by Custom PC.[/quote:36d1a5d217]

The main purpose of the drive was to reduce the number of drives in my PC. I already had 2 x 200gb and a 250gb drive.

I've just mailed ASUS and annoyingly they say in pigeon English:

[quote]Sir, due to some SATA2 disks may have compatible issues, if your harddisk is SATA2 harddisk,
please check your harddisk, if there is a jumper which allow you set the disk to sata1 150 mode, please set to that.
If you don't know how you can contact the disk vendor for a help.

[Anonymous]

[Removed at the request of the author]