Problem w/ WD 13gig HD

[Dyre]

I got a new 13 gig Western Digital UDMA66 Hard Drive for my other system and i cant seam to get it to install correctly. On this system i can only get it to format as an 8 gig and a 5 gig partitions, and on the other system it doesnt detect. My Maxtor 13 gigs worked fine on both systems...

Id like to set this drive as a primary slave and just use it as UDMA33 (i dont have a 66 controller). Can some one give me a proper step by step for WD drives, as they obviously dont work the same as Maxtor drives. I have the jumper set correctly on it. Do i need a UDMA66 cable for this drive, even though its not running in UDMA66 mode?
Thanx all. This thing is really pissing me off, as i have NEVER had any install problems with HD's before...

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PIII 450 @ 464
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's

[Hunsow]

Did you look on the western digital website?

[Easty]

That's what you get for buying WD.. I have had some formating problems before it resulted in geting a boot disk.. made by ontrack. now these guys make little programs that partion and format the drive in prep for an OS.. They do produce versions of the Disk manager (DM) software for maxtor, quantm and seagate among others.. Maybe theres a free download on site www.ontrack.com !! second thought..I have had problems with fat32..where a drive would not system bootable or format right.. and after a fat16 fdisk and format..then fdisk 32 again have worked perfect.. some wierd boot block configuration I certainly don't understand!

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Ath 650,G4MAX,MSI Mobo, Vortex 2, Maxtor 6880+, 128 (100)

[Easty]

cont' here it the product..
http://www.ontrack.com/op/op_2.asp

Maybe you could aquire it from somewhere for evaluation.. see if it works then think about purchasing it!

This software normally acompanies a retail drive, did you but it OEM?

[Dyre]

I got the drive OEM and the free software(EZ-Drive or something)from WD site is shit. Useless. YEah i know i was asking for it getting a WD and i never would have bought, but im not my brother... he bought it he didnt know any beter.

Ill find an "Evalutation Copy" of the other stuff... I just want to format this damn thing!

ARGGG

------------------
PIII 450 @ 504
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's

[DentyCracker]

Check out the documentation on your drive on WD's site. There may be a jumper setting you need to change. Disk Manager is always a last resort. Also check if there is a bios upgrade for your mobo that addresses this problem. BTW i'll NEVER buy WD based on my experiences with them.

[Dyre]

Yeah, i know not to buy them... Like i said above my brother bought it, not i. i though he was getting a maxtor... Ohhh well. Its working correctly now. Just took me about 20 different ways of trying to F-DISK it. Had to manually set the partition to max size, not letting FDISK do it manually. Ohhh well, now he knows not to buy WD too.

One + Of WD is my 2 gig WD from early 96 is still running fine.. with no bad sectors. That is the only luck ive ever had with them.

------------------
PIII 450 @ 504
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's

[GT98]

Hey Guys whats the deal with the hostitly with Western Digital Drives? At my old job I used well over 100 of them with ASUS motherboards and never had a problems with them installing wise. The Western digital Data Lifeguard Tools which sets up and formats your drive is one of the best utites I've have ever used. I have had problems with them dying a premature death at times(without lost of data, usally can recover it), but their excellent cross RMA they offer with a 3 yr warrenty is top notch.

As for a bad drive manufacture...I have nothing but bad luck with maxtor. I remember getting my first Pentium-90 system back in 1994 and the 850 HD I had in it from them crapped out after 60 days. Fast Forward to 1998 when I put my current system together with a 13GB Maxtor Drive..I had the damn thing 2-3 weeks and it crapped out totally! Then I went to return it to the place that I bought it (after calling maxtor tech support and them not giving me a good answer for when I would get a replacement) and they held onto for month it because Maxtor didn't have any replacements for it! What BS is that??? The place I got it from gave me a credit and I went out and got the current 13 GB drive that I have running Win2000 on now.

Scott


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Abit BH6 with a P3-450@558,128mb RAM,G400 MAX,SB Live!, Optiquest V95 19in montor, Asus 40x CD-ROM, Aopen 5x DVD-ROM, 2x CDR,SupraMax 56k modem, Win98 SE on Western Digital 30.7GB, Win2000 on a WD 13 GB HDD

[Dyre]

Thats odd, cuase i have the same type of story, just reversed companies. LoL. My friend worked in a local comp store for a couple years and had more PC's come in with bad WD hard drives than anyhing else. He said they got two or three a week that were bad..

[Alegria]

Hi, you didn't tell us which OS you were using to partition the drive...
Maybe it has got to do something with the OS's limitations.

Regards,
Alegria

[Dyre]

Nope, it was just a stuburn drive. Just trying to format to FAT32 for win9x.
Its all better now.

------------------
PIII 450 @ 504
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 ECC RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's

[Raptor^]

I've still got my Maxtor 850 meg from an old P120, running in a Linux gateway... its always been fine

Never bought a WD, a story I read about a bug in the controller firmware that caused them to head crash occassionally put me off:P
Had an IBM 10 gig 10k rpm SCSI drive go wrong last summer, that was a controller prob too, engineer came out with another drive, saw what the prob was and just swapped the controllers over between the drives and its been ok since.

Spose all this says is that there are always faulty components out there, you just gotta try and minimise the chance of getting one yourself

[DentyCracker]

I've had a 1.6 GB WD and its 3.2 GB replacement go bad on me after a few months each. By the way WD are not producing drives for high end computers anymore. I have had good experiences with Maxtor (sort of). Only problem was with the 10 GB 7200 rpm one I bought a year ago that went bad all of a sudden. (I may actually have killed it accidentally) Anyway they had this "no quibble" replacement policy, but claimed their computer system was down LOL. Anyway I replaced it with an IBM 10 GB which was a little slower. Eventually after much bitching via email (fax the mofos when they don't respond to email)I faxed them a strongly worded letter and got an RMA the next morning. They called me in Jamaica at home to give it to me! Anyway it went up was repaired and sent back and is in my brother's machine working fine since August. I've installed Maxtors (10 GB and up) in several machines without problems. My current preference is for IBM at the moment as they are not only fast and reliable but tend to be quiet as well.

[Dyre]

Heheh, i had to replace my 13 gig Maxtor awhile ago. It died on me all of a sudden... Well i kinda , killed it. Knocked over my tower while the system was running! AK!!! Well needless to say i started it up and it went *click click click click click* Hehehhe. Called Maxtor and had a new drive two days later. I just said it stoped working. Heheh that was fun, but i did lose about 12 gigs of dats! Yikes!



------------------
PIII 450 @ 504
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 ECC RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's