New WD Hard Drive Defective?

[itsme6582]

I got an old computer from my girlfriend with a bad hard drive. It was clicking pretty badly. My plan is to put get a new hard drive and give Linux a shot. I ordered, from NewEgg, an ATA 160GB Western Digital Blue hard drive and my bios will not detect it.

I've tried reconnecting the cables a hundred times. I've used the IDE cables from the detected CD-ROMs and that isn't working either. I can hear the drive making some noise when I put my ear to it so I don't think the power cable is bad.

I downloaded WD's Lifeguard tools and burned a bootable DOS CD to see if I could find anything. The diagnostics say "No Drive Found. I also get error code 0120 which is an "unknown error" according to WD's site.
http://tiny.cc/K7rWY

WD is a reputable manufacturer. What are the chances that I got a defective HDD?

 

[Dalarast]

Pretty good chances you got a bad HD. Even though WD is a good company and makes good products they do get some bad devices and batches. At BestBuy we get issues were a bad batch of HD is made and we recall the devices and get them pulled and send them back to the warehouse. We can't determine which ones are bad so we pull all of a given model.

NewEgg is a good company as well and you might be able to return through them.

Good luck!

 

[david_42]

It's also possible the drive is too large for the computer to handle, so it rejects it. I've seen the problem before as some BIOS can only deal with a fixed number of tracks and sectors.

I had to replace my motherboard because it couldn't deal with USB 2 cards.

 

[gingerdawg]

Prolly a silly question, but do you have the master/slave/cable select jumper positioned correctly?

 

[hal2814]

First, set your drive up as the only drive on the machine and set the jumper to Primary/Master. If the BIOS still doesn't pick it up and your BIOS will let you, put in the track, sector, etc. values manually and see if that gets the drive picked up. If not, then either your drive is bad or your BIOS doesn't detect the drive.

Next, check to see if there's a BIOS update. Sometimes you have to update the BIOS to get it to recognize drives larger than what existed when the motherboard was manufactured. If there is an update, run it and try step one again. You could do this first but I personally don't like updating my BIOS unless I have to.

If that doesn't work, then either your drive is bad or your computer won't support it. Either way, it'll need to be returned.

 

[Bobby_M]

The easy way to test it is to connect it to a newer computer that you know for a fact does not have any drive size limitations lower than 160G.

 

[Homercidal]

WD's drives are set to standalone by default. You shouldn't have to mess with the jumpers (but double-check anyway). Make sure the cable is not on backwards (not likely these days since all cables are now keyed).

Double-check the BIOS that the IDE ports are active.

Test in another computer.

Even if the drive is too big to be used by an older machine, the BIOS should recognize the drive on boot up.

Go into the BIOS and see if the drive is recognized there.

 

[hal2814]

Even if the drive is too big to be used by an older machine, the BIOS should recognize the drive on boot up.

Not necessarily. I know for a fact the BIOS on the old KT133 chipsets would not recognize a drive larger than it supported.

 

[Homercidal]

Yes, but the drive should still show up, right? Even if the drive was unusable, the BIOS would report the manufacturer and some other info.

 

[hal2814]

Yes, but the drive should still show up, right? Even if the drive was unusable, the BIOS would report the manufacturer and some other info.

Nope. Not in that case. It showed up as an empty slot. I did a BIOS update supporting larger drives and it showed right up.

 

[Homercidal]

Nope. Not in that case. It showed up as an empty slot. I did a BIOS update supporting larger drives and it showed right up.

Strange. I may have already upgraded the BIOS in mine. I was into the overclocking at that point. If he is running a KT133, he really needs to get rid of it and upgrade!

 

[itsme6582]

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Here's what I've figured out. It still won't work. I can't get any hard drive to detect.

My roommate has an ME computer collecting dust. I booted that computer up fine. I have been able to get the ME computer to detect the new drive when hooked up as slave. It's only 137 GB detected which is normal according to WD because of the age of the motherboard.

I've tried hooking up the ME hard drive on the newer motherboard and it won't detect.

I've tried switching the CD-ROM and DVD-ROM in the primary IDE slot on the motherboard and they detected fine.

I've tried the IDE cable from the CD/DVD-ROMS (which I know work) to no avail.

I've tried all kinds of jumper positions. I've tried the drive with no jumper (single drive config); jumper on the right (cable select); jumper on the right (reverse of cable select in case I am dyslexic); alternate jumper positions from WD's site.

I've tried the ME drive as a single in the secondary IDE slot and as a master with the new drive slave. Still nothing. I can't get that drive to detect either.

I'd like to update the motherboard and CPU on this computer but that has to wait for my birthday because there are other priorities if I'm gonna that kind of money. I'm hesitant to jump into an upgrade like this because I am having troubles with this hard drive upgrade

My options seem to be to keep this drive and play around with it until I give up or it works. Return the drive and get a replacement from NewEgg. Return the drive and get my money back minus restock fee.

 

[itsme6582]

bump......

 

[Brew-Happy]

Can you bump us the make model and relevant specs of the "old" computer.

I think your BIOS is not able to even recognize the HD. What size of HD was in the ME comp? If the older computer is REALLY old, it may not recognize anything over 10GB.

Google " Maximum hard drive supported by _______________" where the ______ is your make and model. Odds are someone else had this issue before.

Odds are you bought an ATA-6 HD (been looking myself). I wonder if the motherboard is compatible with ATA-6 if it "old".

 

[itsme6582]

The motherboard I'm having problems with is ASROCK K7S41GX. This system was built for XP.

The system that I was able to detect the hard drive on is older and was built for ME.

Last night I flashed the BIOS with the newest version. Nothing is different. I did have something interesting happen though. I manually entered the info into the BIOS and ran Ubuntu from a thumbdrive. Just for kicks, I started the install. I got through the basic settings. Here's where it gets interesting. All of a sudden the install shows my drive with all 160 GB and I can set up partitions. I just do a basic partition with 25 GB for the OS and 5 GB for swap and leave the rest for files and software. When I start the format I get an error and it stops. I restarted and the drive isn't showing up in the install anymore.

 

[Brew-Happy]

That is very interesting.

I found the manual for your moboard: http://download.asrock.com/manual/K7S41GX.pdf

Here is an interesting section:

[Auto]: Select [Auto] to automatically detect hard disk drive. If autodetection
is successful, the BIOS Setup automatically fills in the
correct values for the remaining fields on this sub-menu. If the autodetection
fails, it may due to that the hard disk is too old or too new.
If the hard disk was already formatted on an older system, the BIOS
Setup may detect incorrect parameters. In these cases, select [User]
to manually enter the IDE hard disk drive parameters

Do you have the IDE set to autodetect? If so, try the [User] selection. This should allow you to set the parameters of the HD.

keep at it. I think you are close to solving the issue.

 

[itsme6582]

I've tried manually entering the settings in the BIOS. I used these settings:
Cylinders 1023
Heads 16
Sectors 63
I got those from this manual
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2779-001001.pdf?wdc_lang=en

Still nothing. That is actually what I had done just before I was able to set up the partitions but failed to format.

 

[Dwain]

Just had a similar problem with an old Compaq that I put a new 500 gb/hd. I formatted the new hd with XP, the computer had vista originally. The computer could not detect any of the settings and would not recognize a lot of the hardware. The whole "other hardware" tab had a big yellow question mark in the device manager tab. Long story short, a discussion page associated with the HP support page told how to download/run a bunch of drivers. This was posted by an individual. Downloaded the ones for the chipset and the ethernet controller card with another computer and burned them to a cd. installed/ran them on the suspect computer and they found the hardware. Updated the drivers per the discussion board and everything's fine.

 

[tkerugger]

Did you get a SATA drive when an EIDE drive is what you needed?

Just a thought...

-neil

 

[mordantly]

wd caviars are rock solid. i have 6 of them from 20gb up to 500gb. better than maxtor diamondmax's, got 4 of them 40gb to 120gb. even got a couple seagate barracuda's.

make sure it is set to single drive, if no other drive is on the cable, and plugged in to the end pata port, and in the primary slot. if the bios does not detect, it needs to be set to auto and should find it. the 4.7gb barrier is most likely not an issue here. did you correctly create a primary and active partition? if not, it'll never be allowed to boot.

 

[itsme6582]

1. Can't update drivers for an operating system if none is installed.
2. If I bought an SATA drive, how would I be able to connect and IDE ribbon?!

After working with ASROCK tech support I've concluded the IDE controller has gone bad. I've decided to return the drive.

The plan all along has been to upgrade the HDD for now and then upgrade the motherboard and CPU sometime within the next year. I guess I'll just have to wait and do it all at once.