Upgrading to 2TB HD and having major problems

vaughn96

Honorable
Sep 10, 2013
2
0
10,510
I have a HP dv6t-6100. I decided to upgrade to a 2tb drive. I bought a new Western Digital WD20NPVT 2TB WD Green Hard Drive. I installed it and everything seemed fine and after a couple of days the drive failed. It was clicking and ended up having bad sectors. I did a RMA and put in a 2nd drive of the same model and the exact same thing occurred. So that's 2 new drives that failed in a matter of days after being installed. I looked at the specs of the laptop, it shows that it supports up to a 1TB, however I've seen many situations where a motherboard will support more than what the spec sheet says. So I'm trying to figure out if I've just had bad luck with drives or if this laptop is damaging the drives due to incompatibility. Has anyone had experience with an issue as this? Does anyone know if this laptop damaging the drives? Any input would be greatly appreciated. I have a 3rd drive here that I'm scared to put in it in fear that it will also fail. Thanks
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
The only thing that would prevent you from running it is power and size (thickness) and if there were restrictions on that they would mention it.

I'd be concerned on how they were shipped before worrying about if they work on my laptop. If packaging wasn't up to par I'd be on the phone ...
 
Did you even go into the bios to see if it detected the drive at the right capacity ?
How is it supposed to function right with the wrong calculated cylinders, heads, and sectors of the drive. It has to be mapped right.

Or you get bad sector errors, read write head errors. (The clicking sound.)

Consider this if a mother board only supports a maximum memory capacity what happens.? It a: does not work and complains or simply ignores the rest of the memory. because it cannot map it !

Two of the same drives fail with the same errors so what does it say, it cannot map the drive with the correct cylinders,read write heads, or the sectors.
So it can only map a drive to a capacity of 1 tb.

It may show as a 2tb drive but the bios cannot physically address the space.
Or set up the correct C,H,S settings/ LBA mode number
Sata drives still list the correct values in order for the drive to function properly.
wrong values set up in the bios result in errors.
Have check to see if it is the case.
I would then see if there is a bios update for the motherboard/ laptop that may accommodate larger drive capacity to fix the problem based on bios revision.

Sorry if it sounded harsh, but you did want to know the reason as to why both drives exhibited the exact same symptoms after some use.





 

vaughn96

Honorable
Sep 10, 2013
2
0
10,510
Thank you for your replies. Be as harsh as you want, I just need to figure this out.
When I first install a new drive, I look in windows it shows the 2TB drive and it shows the correct available space in windows. I have gone in the bios to look around and it doesn't show capacity. I am running the latest bios version by the way. There's 5 tabs in bios; main, security, diagnostics, system configuration and exit. The main tab shows a lot of info about the computer, no mention of hard drive. Under diagnostics I can run a hard disk test. Under system configuration I can change the boot order and it shows the "notebook hard drive" No mention of size anywhere but it's obvious the bios sees the hard drive. I put the original 1TB drive back in it and the bios is the same way, no mention of capacity. Which seems odd to me, there's no options to control anything with SATA or anything relating to the HD for that matter. I just thought of something that might be a clue. The new 2TB drives work great until I copy 1.25TB of music onto it. So the drive seems fails when it starts using more than 1TB. Also, the 2TB drive was barely thicker than the original 1TB so I was able to make it fit, no issue there. I never thought about power? I suppose that could be an issue? Thanks again for all your help