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Help with WD740 Raptor

F

finagle69

Member
hey guys... long time lurker, first time poster 😉

just received a 74G Raptor yesterday from the Egg. I tried to image my current boot drive (WD 80G) over to it but to no avail. tried using the Data Lifeguard utilities for the drive in windows... didn't work (i used drive to drive copy). it copied the info over, but didn't copy the paging file (i've since turned it off), and when trying to boot to windows on it, it said missing NTLDR.DLL i think. after that, i formatted it, then tried to use Norton Ghost 7.0 Enterprise. made a ghost boot disk then tried to do both disk to disk and partition to partition, but it closed the proggie out with an error both times due to the destination being smaller than the source.

so, last night, i tried to use the Data Lifeguard utilities again, but this time i told it to make the drive the new boot drive, then selected drive to drive... thinking this would work, i went to sleep. this morning, i woke up to find the comp frozen on the screensaver 🙄. rebooted and the controller wouldn't recognize the SATA drive :rolleyes^2:. turned her off, then swapped the SATA port it was plugged in to, rebooted and it recognized it :sigh:. checkdisk wanted to run and found errors like crazy for about 10 minutes and barely moved to 1%! i didn't have time for it to finish (at work now), so i rebooted and let windows boot up, booted up fine and explorer sees the hdd, but i can't access it, nor will scandisk run on it, nor will the format option work on it (crashes explorer if i try either one).

Question now is... what the hell can i do to fix it. hopefully i didn't crap the drive out, i'm assuming i'll need something to reformat the drive then try this all again.

Thx in advance for your time reading my plea for help/rant. sys specs are below if it helps.

sys specs:
Barton 2500+ @3200+ on NF7-S Rev2 latest BIOS
1G (2x512) Geil Golden Dragon Dual Channel PC3200
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
*on the fritz* WD 74G Raptor
WD 80G 8M cache
WD 200G 8M cache
Audigy
burners yada yada
Windows XP Pro -> NTFS
 
It does sound as if your drive has problems. That was not your original problem however. There should be a diagnostic utility bundled in with Data Lifeguard. You should run that and see what results you get. If there is no utility, I guarantee there will be one available at the WD site. Assuming all checks out OK, read on.

Well, assuming you had whatever drivers may be required for SATA to function in your original install, you should be good to go in that regard. A simple check in Device Manager for any yellow exclamation marks would be in order. Make sure you are OK in that regard. It sounds as if you are, because you were able to see the drive within Windows. BIOS settings may also have to be adjusted to enable a boot from SATA.

If I understand your post correctly, you attempted to copy your drive over within Windows. There is no way that is going to work and make the replacement drive bootable. You may want to look through the Data Lifeguard Utility and see if there are any provisions for making either a Floppy or CD that will do the work. Insert the disk, reboot and go from there sort of thing.

If not, Acronis will do the job. You can download a demo and I have been told (no personal experience here) that although the software is crippled, you can make disks to accomplish what you need to do in this case. Once again, I am not positive of this. I own a purchased copy and cannot vouch for the functionality of the demo.

One other thing I noticed is that you first referred to making an Image. You do not want an Image. You cannot boot off an Image. You want to copy and make bootable. Also, disconnect that IDE boot drive before first boot so Windows does not get confused. You can deal with that drive later.

Acronis will give you an F6 prompt for third party SCSI or RAID drivers. You may want to have those handy to be certain your drive copy will be succesful. If you need them, your SATA drive will not be available in Acronis. This will be your tip off.

Just read your specs. I'd back off on the overclocking until you get this up and working. It's nice to minimize any variables that could be causing you problems.
 
thanks for your reply. the drivers are installed, but i'm not sure if i set the BIOS to allow SATA bootable. I'll have to check that out. there is a utility for checking out the disk in the data lifeguard stuff, but i don't have the floppy for it, purchased the drive OEM. i do have a floppy, but it only recognizes IDE's b/c it came with my 80G.

I (still at work) thought of using an old win98 boot disk to fdisk it and then scandisk it. after that if all's well, i was thinking of changing the size of the 80G partition in windows to just under 70G (either with computer mgmt in win or with partition magic), then try to use Ghost again to do a disk to disk. if it doesn't work after that, i'll try to find a demo of Acronis and see if i can finagle it to work 😉

 
Here's a link. Look under Diagnostic Utilities. This will create a bootable floppy that can run a diagnostic on your drive.

People seem to have mixed results here with Ghost. I see more with bad results than good with SATA drives.

Acronis does work. I have personal experience with this. Here's a link for Acronis.

Your 98 boot disk idea is not going to work because XP Pro must use NTFS. You'll be creating a FAT partition. You could try this just for diagnosis though. Just delete all partitions afterwards.
 
thx for those links. actually it's not required that you fun NTFS for XP, it's recommended, and i do use NTFS. but, as you suggested, i'm only using the 98 fdisk to put it in FAT32 for diagnostics purposes. once that's done and (hopefully) all's ok, i'll delete the partition and add a new one NTFS. I'll then try to use Acronis to copy the info from the 80 to the 74. Sound reasonable and feasible?
 
I stand corrected, I thought FAT was only available with XP Home and was required for Pro. After some quick research, I see it's only required to take advantage of the security features NTFS provides.

Sounds reasonable and feasible to me.
 
well, that's the least of my worries now. when i got home from work, i turn on the comp only for the 80G to not work... in the process of reinstalling xp on it now 🙁

edit: the Raptor was making that "CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK" noise that is ever so evident of a malfunctioning drive... woe is me. RMA time to Newegg.
 
I've never had any luck out of WD. I did, however, drop a Maxtor from a 10Ft balcony and not even have to format it to get it to boot into Windows. No errors at all. Fvsk WD. Maxtor and Seagate for me.
 
Any RMA's I've done lately I've dealt directly with the manufacturer when I could. Oftentimes the shipping has been free.

Sorry to hear your drive is messed up.🙁
 
hmm, that's a good idea. i'll contact WD themselves then, and see if i can get free shipping both ways. do you know how long the manufacturers waranty is for retail drives? my 80G is now crapped, so i'll se if they'll replace that one too :/
 
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