Dangit... new hard drive, dead in three days!

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Dangit... new hard drive, dead in three days!

Posted: 5/12/2004 7:24:37 PM EDT

On Sunday I installed a spanking new, fresh 160 GB Western Digital hard drive in my PC, operating as the secondary, data only drive, specifically for storage of a rather impressive collection of digital pictures.

The install went perfectly smooth. Zero hiccups. I transferred about 3 GB's worth of pictures to the drive, and all was well.

Well, today when I got home, the NEW drive was going thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.....pause......thump, thump, thump, thump, thump......pause....and so on, ad nauseum.

Nice.

I tried to access its contents. No soap.

Restart, and get a primary slave hard drive error. Go into BIOS, and note that (1) the BIOS lists this drive incorrectly as 8.4 GB and not LBA compatible to boot (both wrong) and (2) the thump...thump...thump isn't coming from the drive anymore.

A call to the PC maker (DELL) confirms that this machine is compatible with drives over 137 GB, and I do have Windows XP Service Pack 1 and all newer patches installed, so I'm good to go as far as anyone can tell. And it WAS working, for three days.

I'll fire up the drive on power only as the WD site suggests, and see if it still does the thump thump thing with no data cable connected. If it DOES, the drive is bad. If it doesn't, I've got one of the stranger possible PC issues.

If it's a bad drive, I wonder if WD can just swap out the controller card for a new one? I'm willing to bet almost any odds that the media itself is fine, and the problem is on the drive's controller board.

Anyone here had any similar experiences that might be of some help to me?

CJ

Posted: 5/12/2004 7:31:19 PM EDT

[#1]

I have had 2 drives take a dump on me in the 1st week. Both were Maxtors.

I buy all my drives at Best Buy since they have a 30 day return, no questions asked policy.

Where did you buy the drive? Just return it, they should swap it out.

Posted: 5/12/2004 7:31:30 PM EDT

[#2]

I'd return it.

I've noticed that overall, the quality of most hard disks has gone to hell. I've lost several over the past year, but some of my oldest ones are still working fine.

Posted: 5/12/2004 7:32:26 PM EDT

[#3]

I have tried switching controller boards after a head crash like that with no joy.
After one too many Thump Thump Thumps it bangs itself all out of whack.
It seemed to run nice and smooth but the data was all weirded out.

Posted: 5/12/2004 7:58:35 PM EDT

[#4]

Most of my dead drives have been Maxtors, they dont seem to be a good as they used to be to me. Me and friends of mine put our equipment through hell sometimes. Seagates have been working well foir me and they are cheap.

Posted: 5/12/2004 8:13:17 PM EDT

[#5]

Quoted:
specifically for storage of a rather impressive collection of digital pictures.

Porn? I dont even have a gig of it.

Posted: 5/12/2004 8:13:25 PM EDT

[#6]

my worst experience was with an IBM Deathstar.. I mean Deskstar.. warranted for 5 years, broke down in 10 months. IBM refused to replace it under warranty, and I had to spend $1,750 to get all the data recovered.

I learned my lesson, though, and have my hard drives in RAID with total data backup. Look into it.

Posted: 5/12/2004 8:15:58 PM EDT

[#7]

They either die in the 1st 6 months or after the 10th year. Never inbetween.

Posted: 5/12/2004 8:35:26 PM EDT

[#8]

The 60g WD that died on me was 2 months old. Circuit City only replaces for 30 days, and WD wants the old one back before sending a replacement. I'm not giving anyone that drive with the info that's on it, so I'll just take the loss and buy a new one.

I hate getting "the shaft".

Posted: 5/12/2004 8:39:29 PM EDT

[#9]

The morale of the story, be sure to back up all your stuff. I too have a Western Digital 160GB HDD, and one day I started getting all of these weird IO errors. I'm running Windows XP, so at boot-up time, it would go thru all of these funny gyrations, and screws up some of my files, but not all. I ran Norton's Disk Doktor, and it flagged about 20GBs worth of sectors as bad. Spent a lot of time & effort getting all the corrupted files back. All of my important files, I backup to DVD-RWs or CD-RWs. I'm going to return the drive to WD soon for another one, I think, but I'm thinking with all the reports of HDD failure, I'm going to keep it until WD introduces a newer driver. At least in kind of works. I've got a 3 year warranty.

Posted: 5/12/2004 9:02:43 PM EDT

[#10]

... Sorry, I know this won't alleviate your current problem cmjohnson, but solid state disk drives are right on the cusp replacing, and fundementally rendering magnetic hard drives obsolete.

... It's equivalent to the technical transition from VHS tapes to DVD's.

Posted: 5/12/2004 9:07:50 PM EDT

[#11]

Toss it in the freezer for a couple hours and see if it works.
If it does, transfer the data and get your replacent.

All of my WD's are working fine.

My last Maxtor took a shit a couple months after I got it.

Posted: 5/12/2004 9:35:24 PM EDT

[#12]

Quoted:
Toss it in the freezer for a couple hours and see if it works.
If it does, transfer the data and get your replacent.

All of my WD's are working fine.

My last Maxtor took a shit a couple months after I got it.

As well as installing it upside down.

Don't laugh too hard, the combination did work for me!

Posted: 5/13/2004 4:34:17 AM EDT

[#13]

Frozen and upside down. Got it.

Can't hurt to try.

Porn? No, not a bit of it. I really don't go for that. Ted Nugent said it best:
"Explicit sex, it ain't my cup of tea, unless of course, it's happening to me."

CJ

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Dangit... new hard drive, dead in three days!

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