Hi guys,
I've been bulding an Athlon 64 PC running Win XP Home since last evening and have had the typical run of depressing experiences. Probably the biggest one is that I can't successfully full-format either one of my new OEM Western Digital SATA-II Caviar SE drives. In the first case, it did fine for a while, but it stalled at 91% of the format complete. I tried again and it stalled again at 91%. I then tried the other one and it just froze the system shortly after starting the format. I tried a second time and it did it again. There were also weird things like BIOS reported both drives at one point as being much smaller than they are, but both the same size (I think it said they were both about 135 Gigs and they are both 250 gig drives). I have an Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra motherboard.
Another thing that has been happening is irregular loud clicks from both drives as Windows starts up, and then random clicks here and there during operation on one of the drives (I did manage to quick format that one and it is reported as healthy). These clicks are loud, and not the same as the steady "click of death" that happens when drives wont spin on startup (I've had that happen to another WD drive). The drive that reached and then stalled at 91% formatting made these clicks at random times throughout being formatted.
The sound is much like the last sound you hear when your PC powers down and all devices shut off. I've heard it before from another drive during operation (that drive is still working), but it's always a sound I hear as a single loud click from the drive (this is on my Dell) when the power goes off. Someone said it was probably the drive head snapping back quickly to rest position in that case.
The quick formatted drive seems to be working fine except the clicking, though.
FWIW, I alread have Windows installed on a successfully formatted 30 gig IDE drive, so I know that the system is capable of running a drive properly (though that one is not SATA or SATA-II).
Any ideas on what the source of all this is? Do yout think I really had monumentally bad luck and got two bad drives in the same shipment? Could this be a problem with XP handling SATA-II, 3.0 gb/sec drives? No drivers came with the OEM drives so I just relied on Windows and anyhting that was on my m/b driver disk to handle it.
This is really a stumper and obviously has me dead in the water at this point. It's not too late to send both drives back to Newegg (while cursing under my breath), but I need to have some way of feeling sure both drives are really physically bad before I do.
Is there a disk checking utility seomone knows of that I can use on unformatted drives?
Thanks very much,
Dave
I've been bulding an Athlon 64 PC running Win XP Home since last evening and have had the typical run of depressing experiences. Probably the biggest one is that I can't successfully full-format either one of my new OEM Western Digital SATA-II Caviar SE drives. In the first case, it did fine for a while, but it stalled at 91% of the format complete. I tried again and it stalled again at 91%. I then tried the other one and it just froze the system shortly after starting the format. I tried a second time and it did it again. There were also weird things like BIOS reported both drives at one point as being much smaller than they are, but both the same size (I think it said they were both about 135 Gigs and they are both 250 gig drives). I have an Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra motherboard.
Another thing that has been happening is irregular loud clicks from both drives as Windows starts up, and then random clicks here and there during operation on one of the drives (I did manage to quick format that one and it is reported as healthy). These clicks are loud, and not the same as the steady "click of death" that happens when drives wont spin on startup (I've had that happen to another WD drive). The drive that reached and then stalled at 91% formatting made these clicks at random times throughout being formatted.
The sound is much like the last sound you hear when your PC powers down and all devices shut off. I've heard it before from another drive during operation (that drive is still working), but it's always a sound I hear as a single loud click from the drive (this is on my Dell) when the power goes off. Someone said it was probably the drive head snapping back quickly to rest position in that case.
The quick formatted drive seems to be working fine except the clicking, though.
FWIW, I alread have Windows installed on a successfully formatted 30 gig IDE drive, so I know that the system is capable of running a drive properly (though that one is not SATA or SATA-II).
Any ideas on what the source of all this is? Do yout think I really had monumentally bad luck and got two bad drives in the same shipment? Could this be a problem with XP handling SATA-II, 3.0 gb/sec drives? No drivers came with the OEM drives so I just relied on Windows and anyhting that was on my m/b driver disk to handle it.
This is really a stumper and obviously has me dead in the water at this point. It's not too late to send both drives back to Newegg (while cursing under my breath), but I need to have some way of feeling sure both drives are really physically bad before I do.
Is there a disk checking utility seomone knows of that I can use on unformatted drives?
Thanks very much,
Dave
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