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WD Caviar Black 500GB SATA HDD - Not Being Detected
So I'm letting some games download from Steam overnight, I wake up, and my computer is sitting at that screen you can sometimes see during start up (Press Tab for system information, or whatever it says), and at the bottom it says SATA 3 error or not detected or something along those lines.
Well, I move on from that screen, and it says, Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device or Insert Media Device (or something along those lines). I put in my Windows 7 disc, gets to the blue sky background and I can move my mouse around, then nothing. I tried installing Ubuntu 10.10 and I got to where it lists of HDD Space, Internet Connection, and something else. Apparently I don't have more than 2.6GBs of space available. So naturally I finally assume, my HDD isn't working.
I tried replacing the red SATA cords, plugging it into a different slot on my Power Supply, and plugging it into a different SATA connector on my mother board. My disc drive works no matter what cord or slot I use, so I think that rules that out. Is it possible that it just up and died on me? I've barely had it a week (6 days, MAYBE 7).
There's the link to the product.
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Comments
To hell with it.
Tried using the power cord and SATA cables I was using on the HDD on my Disc Drive, and they worked fine. Switched around through SATA ports 1-5, still got nothing (again disc drive worked in any).
I ran the Lifeguard Test, and it didn't even detect it as a Western Digital Drive (said NON-WD Drive Error: blah blah blah). Checked the label to just to be 100% sure I got the right product, and it is.
Everything else seems to be working flawlessly though. Asus Mobo screen comes on at start up, I can get to the starting points of installation for Windows and Ubuntu (can't go any further because they don't detect a HDD though). I've tried resetting the BIOS and that didn't help. Probably just took a dump on me. I'll call WD tech support later and if that doesn't get me anywhere then I'll just call NewEgg and RMA it.
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While I'm at it, can I just use an External Hard Drive until I get my replacement HDD back?
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An external drive will be fine as long as it isn't the main boot drive. It will only be as fast as the port you use which I assume is a USB one. All an external drive is, is an internal drive attached to some additional electronics in order to change the data transfer method.
You could open the external drive's shell, pull the drive out and install it in your system. I'm not going to recommend you do that though. External drives have their uses.
i have the same exact HDD(well 2 actually) and I can say that they are very nice drives. Dont let this experience pull you away from WD.
Now with that said, if your HDD was working and now its not being noticed, it prolly crashed. sry for the bad news.
Last, dont use your external. Its sooo slow to run the OS through USB. Gaming wont be possible. Your just gonna have to wait it out or go buy a cheap internal at Frys/Best Buy,
gl
I figured it'd be slow. I'll pass on that then. Yeah, I'll prolly go check out Best Buy and Staples to see if they've got anything cheap to hold me over temporarliy.
Yeah WD products are usually quite amazing. All my friends use WD drives and not once have they had any problems. Ah well, it happens I suppose. It could have been worse... like exploded or something.
EDIT: Now all I have to game on is a 360. QQ! I
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Sometimes hardware fails, and it sounds like that's what happened here. Given how precarious the rapidly moving parts in hard drives are, I find it amazing that they don't fail more often. WD Caviar Black hard drives come with a warranty of five years or so, so it should still be under warranty and you should be able to get it replaced. I hope you backed up your data.
Yeah I just printed off my RMA label from NewEgg so I'll probably ship it off sometime tomorrow.
Uhg. Of course not. Ah well. Aside from a few small documents there were just some games on there.
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One easy way to back up the files you care about is to plug in a USB flash drive, tell Windows which folders have the files you care about, and set it to do incremental backup of those files every day. That way, if your hard drive dies, you lose at most a day worth of data.
Games and other software can be reinstalled easily enough. Things like term papers for classes aren't so easy to recover if they weren't backed up.
Windows 7 has a pretty good backup utility built in. This is one of the many reasons why it is far superior to Vista. Vista's backup utility was basically non-functional.
I hated Vista's backup utility. It could not delete old backup images on its own. I had to create a .bat that deleted the old images and had it make a new backup image every week.
Looks like an HDD fail. Caviar Black's are amazing HDDs. No matter what you use, if you have an HDD fail you will have to reinstall applications even if you make backups.
Yeah, sounds like a failed drive. Which is amazing considering how rock solid the blacks are. Mines getting pretty old and its barely showing any signs of age.
If you have an image backup of your hard drive, you can revert to that without having to reinstall everything. But reinstalling applications isn't that big of a deal. Losing all the data that you've accumulated over the years would be a huge problem for many people.
What are the main causes of HDD crashes? Because it worked fine for 6 days then stopped, so I'm wondering if it's something I did. Though, it was packaged kind of badly. Didn't have it's own individual box. It was wrapped once front to back, and once side to side in this really thin kind of bubble wrap, with a sticker thrown on top, sitting inside a bigger box, that just had an anti-static wrist strap in it. So I'm wondering if it might have bounced around too much.
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The mechanical parts on HDDs are the main culprits for HDD failure since they act pretty much like a CD with multiple platters that spin at 7200RPM. Usually an HDD fails in the first week or after a decade, but not much inbetween. Could also be the HDD controller.
What's the HDD controller?
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HDD = Hard Disk Drive. The controller is the chip that tells everything else what to do.
Hard drives really aren't meant to make it to a decade. They're meant to last five years, and while they often live beyond that, past five years, they're really living on borrowed time and shouldn't be depended on to keep important data that you haven't backed up elsewhere. For those that don't fail almost immediately, the failure rate starts to turn upward markedly at about the three year mark. Before this, the failure rate is nearly nothing, so this doesn't become a severe enough problem to warrant replacement in most situations until about five years. The standard recommendation is to replace a hard drive after five years.
Ah, I see. So mine dying in the first week of use then is fairly common amongst HDD's?
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It's not a Sandy Bridge computer is it?
I'm assuming thats some sort of brand name? If so, then no I don't think so. WD HDD, Asus Mobo, AMD PHenom II CPU, Corsair PSU, G.Skill Ram... no Sandy Bridge to my knowledge.
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I would say hard drives fail ALL THE TIME. It is very common for them to fail with no warning what so ever. No one likes to hear it but the main cause of a failed drive is vibration. Leave the machine on your desk? Gotta stop kicking the desk. Leave it on the ground? stop kicking the machine. Im willing to bet 50 % o fyou guys have bad sectors right now.
edited to say: your external drive is simply a sata hard drive with a plastic shell around it. If you didnt buy a cheap one, you can simply remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it directly to the mobo. It is a regualr old hard drive. You can also plug in laptop drives to a desktop mobo aswell. It is a standard old drive... just smaller and slower.
Not common, no, but not unheard of. They are a mechanical device. They don't really need any one cause to break them.
Moving a hard drive while it's on is probably the easiest way to kill a hard drive. They spin, pretty fast. And they have this thing known as angular momentum, which basically makes it act like a gyroscope. You push it one way, it will resist and push back, and if the read head ever touches the platter (it's really really close as it is), the hard drive is toast.
Big temperature changes can kill a hard drive too (like inadequate cooling), but that is more of a slow death.
And Sandy Bridge is a brand name, and again you are correct, you don't have it. It's an Intel CPU. They were recently released and had a recall because of bad hard drive controllers.
If the problem were the defective SATA 2 controller in a Sandy Bridge motherboard, then moving it to a SATA 3 port would have fixed it.
DOA's happen like ppl say, I use to buy WD's but for the last few years I have been going with Hitachi. And yes I have had a few WD's die on me but I stopped using them because of the noise they made.
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