WD1001FAILS...So do you Western Digital!

[alkalinetaupehat]

Bought a TB drive and enclosure as a part of my backup strategy and the TB isn't detected by Vista 64-bit. Checked if it was the enclosure, it's not, and tried the bare drive on a 32-bit XP machine as well.

Going to try the drive out once more in another machine, putting it as the only drive in the system, and see if something happens. If yes, I'll try and format it and get the drive into a usable state for a break-in period. I'll RMA if this doesn't work; I have the packaging it was sent to me in by Newegg.

The other (and perhaps more important) issue is that Western Digital, one of the top storage medium manufacturers, does not have drivers with their bootable diagnostic and disk tools for a simple SATA DVD Burner. Instead, the bundled drivers are from 1997 (!) and are of course for IDE. Also, the Windows installer versions of these programs do not work under Vista 64-bit and fail to launch.

WTH WD?

I plan on writing them about this, since it seems remarkably dumb on their part especially considering the dominance of SATA and increasing market share of 64-bit installations. Valve themselve are moving towards development machines with SLI and 64-bit despite their survey showing approximately 10% of gamers even using 64-bit installations. HL2 is broken in 64-bit too, but that's another story...

 

[F1shF4t]

Not meant to say that you don't know what you're doing but did you go into disk management and intialize and format the drive? Drives that you buy not in enclosures aren't pre partitioned.

I have windows wd diagnostics tools which work fine under vista x64, just have to make sure you launch it as administrator.

Or the drive simply could be faulty, no reason why it would not be detected.

 

[elconejito]

Not sure where the driver issue comes from. What drivers could Vista need for the drive? Or do you mean the enclosure needs drivers? If they are dated from 1997, it's probably USB drivers for Win95/98. Vista shouldn't need those either.

Agree with Dark Cupcake, see if it's showing up in Disk Management. If it is, go ahead and format/partition. If it isn't then definitely a bad drive and RMA it.

And I run WD Diagnostics under Vista x64, just have to run as administrator.

 

[RebateMonger]

The other question is: Does the drive show up in the BIOS when you attach it directly to the motherboard's drive controller?

 

[watrbufalo]

alkalinetaupehat,
i had the same issue with a WD1001FALS drive. Installed it on my everyday system (Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP mobo, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, XP Pro (SP3)). During boot SATALink recognized drive but hung while calculating size. Moved drive to my test system (ASUS M3N78 Pro mobo, AMD Athlon AM2 6000+, Windows 7 Build 7201) and drive came up fine. After initializing and formatting drive, i tried again on the Gigabyte. same results hung. Several hours later i found several things. This is a SATA II drive. Gigabyte mobo is SATA I, ASUS is SATA II. I downloaded and updated drivers/bios on the Gigabyte board to start. On the WD site is info showing that the back of the drive has jumpers. cover jumpers 5 & 6 and drive data transfer speed will go back to SATA I levels. booted again and drive is now recognized. I am now happily filling drive. hope this helps.

 

[TemjinGold]

Originally posted by: watrbufalo
alkalinetaupehat,
i had the same issue with a WD1001FALS drive. Installed it on my everyday system (Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP mobo, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, XP Pro (SP3)). During boot SATALink recognized drive but hung while calculating size. Moved drive to my test system (ASUS M3N78 Pro mobo, AMD Athlon AM2 6000+, Windows 7 Build 7201) and drive came up fine. After initializing and formatting drive, i tried again on the Gigabyte. same results hung. Several hours later i found several things. This is a SATA II drive. Gigabyte mobo is SATA I, ASUS is SATA II. I downloaded and updated drivers/bios on the Gigabyte board to start. On the WD site is info showing that the back of the drive has jumpers. cover jumpers 5 & 6 and drive data transfer speed will go back to SATA I levels. booted again and drive is now recognized. I am now happily filling drive. hope this helps.

Looking at the OP's machine specs, I seriously doubt it isn't SATA2 though...

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: watrbufalo
alkalinetaupehat,
i had the same issue with a WD1001FALS drive. Installed it on my everyday system (Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP mobo, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, XP Pro (SP3)). During boot SATALink recognized drive but hung while calculating size. Moved drive to my test system (ASUS M3N78 Pro mobo, AMD Athlon AM2 6000+, Windows 7 Build 7201) and drive came up fine. After initializing and formatting drive, i tried again on the Gigabyte. same results hung. Several hours later i found several things. This is a SATA II drive. Gigabyte mobo is SATA I, ASUS is SATA II. I downloaded and updated drivers/bios on the Gigabyte board to start. On the WD site is info showing that the back of the drive has jumpers. cover jumpers 5 & 6 and drive data transfer speed will go back to SATA I levels. booted again and drive is now recognized. I am now happily filling drive. hope this helps.

great first post :thumbsup:

 

[hclarkjr]

along with what others have said i would caution you on newegg shipping of hard drives. they are not very well packaged in some cases depending on which warehouse newegg shipped it from. so please do not blame WD for neweggs sloppy shipping methods

 

[watrbufalo]

hclarkjr,
I read elsewhere the same complaint about newegg shipping. the root they suggested was UPS handling of the packages. they went on to suggest to use FedEx shipping. I noticed my box was a little crunched but the drive was wrapped in bubble wrap (OEM ordered), and in a followup from newegg "We have started testing an environmentally responsible, renewable, reusable and recyclable paper packaging material from Ranpak Corp. called FILLPAK TT®. ". My bottom line is the drive seems to be OK, quiet and generating no errors. Generally I have no complaints of the condition of material received from newegg over the last few years, maybe i've just been lucky. Oh, and I get from the Memphis, Tn warehouse. watrbufalo

 

[SunSamurai]

I have the same drive.

7100 did not detect it no matter what I did. 7068 saw it just fine. Something odd with certain windows/bios versions, its not the drives fault.

PS I used the safer shipping as suggested by one newegg review as well. The drive does seem to have a very high pitched bearly audible sound at certain times, like it hasnt spun up fully. I cannot hear it currently.

 

[hclarkjr]

that is funny them blaming UPS for their packaging and suggesting you use FEDEX. my job requires me to check in packages from both FEDEX and UPS and i can tell you first hand that FEDEX blows monkey balls compared to UPS. UPS has it's faults as well but is the better of the two

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: alkalinetaupehat
The other (and perhaps more important) issue is that Western Digital, one of the top storage medium manufacturers, does not have drivers with their bootable diagnostic and disk tools for a simple SATA DVD Burner.

Why would they? Drivers are required only for the storage controller or interface, which is either on the motherboard or inside the external enclosure you are using and would come from those companies, not the hard drive manufacturer. It helps to understand the technology you are using.

 

[watrbufalo]

I THOUGHT I had this beat. When I went and rebooted my XP system with this drive, once again it hung when the SATALink was started. I disconnected the power to the WD drive, and it booted up fine. So for S & G's, i went and powered up the drive. Lo and behold the system is recognizing the drive and seems to behave normally. Read, write and can attach to it from my other pc. I'm not quite sure what this means or what needs to get updated. I have a question in with GIGABYTE Global Technical Service and I'm waiting (hopefully) for a response. sd

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

Originally posted by: Dark Cupcake
Not meant to say that you don't know what you're doing but did you go into disk management and intialize and format the drive? Drives that you buy not in enclosures aren't pre partitioned.

I have windows wd diagnostics tools which work fine under vista x64, just have to make sure you launch it as administrator.

Or the drive simply could be faulty, no reason why it would not be detected.

I know drives not in enclosures aren't pre-partitioned, but I didn't remember to initialize it...my bad. It's now happily formatting to NTFS.

tcsenter & elconejito:
My issue is that their diagnostic tools didn't run from a SATA drive because the bootable OS used to launch the diagnostic tools didn't have a SATA driver and was using an IDE driver from 1997, which seems remarkably dumb.

Dark Cupcake & elconejito:
Under an administrator acct. the tools did not run successfully, and I did try several downloads. Perhaps I'm messing up somewhere.

Packaging from newegg with several HDD's has been good, a laptop drive was fully immobilized in packaging within it's box, and this TB was as well, although only a thin layer of bubblewrap separated it from the HD rack which shipped with it.

The drive did show up in the BIOS and I was even able to run HD Tune 2.55 on it, which is why I didn't want to give up hope and RMA and instead posted here. A friend also reminded me to try initializing the drive earlier, though thanks for all the help everyone!

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: alkalinetaupehat
tcsenter & elconejito:
My issue is that their diagnostic tools didn't run from a SATA drive because the bootable OS used to launch the diagnostic tools didn't have a SATA driver and was using an IDE driver from 1997, which seems remarkably dumb.!

Use IDE emulation mode, provided by all modern mobo BIOS.