WD2000JB Hard Drive Problems :(

[Elderain]

I just bought a Western Digital 200GB 8mb cache drive (WD2000JB). When I first installed the drive, the BIOS only saw it as 128GB, as did WinXP so I updated the BIOS and it then found it as 200GB. I restarted and used the utilities that you can download from there site to partition and format the drive into 2 drives, 110GB and 75GB. It partitioned and formatted them fine, even WinXP saw them as the correct size, etc. but when I copied information onto the drive, it gave me an error and said the directory that I was using is no longer available. I rebooted and got all kinds of checkdisk errors (it said it fixed them) and the directory I had just copied was still there, but alot of the information isn't there, and one of the directories says its invalid or not available, and one of the partitions says it isnt formatted now. I read a few posts saying that the retail version came with a ATA card, but since I just bought the drive only from newegg.com I didn't get one. Is it possible that my slightly older Abit KG7 motherboard cant handle this, or might I just need a new ATA card? Im running Windows XP Pro and all the drives are NTFS file system. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

 

[killumanati]

Sounds to me like the problem actually may be with the drive itself. Usually HD manufactures will have some low level utilities that will enable you to check the HD and even do sector by sector checks I would do this first before spending more money on components. I thing to caution you on some of these utilites will destroy the data on a drive so if you have anything on them you might want to get them off. Matter of fact WD has a product called Data Life Guard that you can use to check your dirve. Here is the URL. Hope this helps

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

 

[HaroldW]

There are two main things you need to break the 137gig barrier. A controller with 48-bit LBA support (when you flashed the BIOS, according to the BIOS revision page you added this) and an operating system patch (see: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q303013). This "patch" is included in Service Pack 1 for XP. Have you installed Service Pack 1? Also, you mentioned "I restarted and used the utilities that you can download from their site to partition and format the drive into 2 drives, 110GB and 75GB." By "their site" I assume you mean Western Digital. I have seen some postings saying people have had problems getting the Western Digital utilities to work right partitioning and formatting the drive.

If you haven't already, I would immediately install Service Pack 1.

If you have already installed Service Pack 1 and perhaps as a last resort, Reinstall XP from scratch, from the install disk, during the install create and format the first partition and install. After XP is installed and before you do anything else, including installing additional drivers, install Service Pack 1, partition and format the second partition with the disk management utility in XP, then, and only then finish installing everything else.

I have my WD2000JB running as a slave to the primary drive. To install it I installed Service Pack 1 on the primary drive before I connected the 200gig drive. Then I just used the Disk Management utility to partition and format and it has been working fine for the 6-8 weeks since I installed it.