Incorrectly Installed a WD Blue SSHD Hard Drive, How to Fix?

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skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
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Hi all,

I invited my brother in law to help me out with installing a brand new WD Blue SSHD. This one to be exact.

Neither of us have any experience with installing a hybrid SSHD drive and I've never even worked with an HDD, so he just treated it like an HDD and proceeded to install accordingly.

While we were installing the new hard drive, we ran into a bunch of errors with partitions. Like for some reason, 50% of the hard drive was locked or something. We were also getting errors about the partition being locked by the original manufacturer, I think.

It's been a while since this happened so bear with me as I may not remember what all went wrong, but I do still have the new hard drive. I just left my old one in and never got around to fixing the issue. Well, just today I got an error in the event viewer saying that my currently installed hard drive is about to fail.

So is there anything special I have to do in order to format the partitions on an SSHD drive? I'm not that worried about losing my info on my current HDD - I have all the important stuff backed up on external hard drives. I just need to make sure I get the hard drive installed correctly this time.
 
Solution
USAFRet
Huge drives are a pain for the OS drive. UEFI and GPT for one...way too much data lost in the case of needing to do an OS reinstall for another.

My current main system has 5 drives, all SSD.
500GB for the OS drive, other drives for other things.
In case of an OS reinstall...all the data living on other drives is not touched.

And if that particular 4TB drive is showing issues....ditch it!
Bad sectors don't get better...only worse.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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OK....the main problem stems from it being a 4TB drive you're wanting to use as the boot drive.

This requires GPT partitioning, and the UEFI option in the BIOS.
Without all that, you can't have more than a 2TB drive as the OS drive.
 
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skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
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1. The fail message was delivered more than a year and a half ago, so I'm not entirely sure. I do remember two specifically that kept popping up, but one might have been for my original HDD that came with the PC.

Like I said, the main error involved the partitions. We'd format the new SSHD, and over half of the storage was locked because my system couldn't access all the partitions.

The second issue (and this might have been directed at my old HDD) involved the drive (I think the partitions as well) being locked behind what I understood to be a manufacturer's block of some kind...if that makes sense?

2. Windows 10

3. Sorry for using imgur, I wasn't sure how else to link directly to an image:
Here's the link...the image upload option didn't work.

4. 4TB

Now that I look at the disk management, I can see that I actually still have the new one plugged in o_O
Says all that space is unallocated, while my original is split into three partitions, I believe.

I want to just migrate (or not really migrate the entire contents of the original HDD) my OS to the new one and completely remove my old one. That wasn't working before.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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You want to migrate from the current 1TB to the new 4TB SSHD?
Problematic. As noted above...a boot drive over 2TB needs those specifications. UEFI and GPT partitioning.

Why not just use the 4TB SSHD as a secondary drive, instead of the boot drive?
 
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skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
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Ok, sorry for deleting the post and then reposting, my brain is having seizures tonight. lol

So, ok, how should I go about doing all that? When I tried searching about it back when I tried installing (because it did actually say something about the UEFI option), it seemed like I was constantly doing something wrong.

I mean, I could probably do a google search now that you pointed me in the right direction, but yeah. Anything else I should know before I start?



The main problem right now is that my main HDD gave me a warning earlier that a fail was imminent. This was all according to the event viewer. My PC has also been crashing recently, and since I saw that warning, I was thinking maybe the HDD was the cause.

Edit: Oh, wait. Are you saying those specs can't be created/added? The SSHD would need to have the UEFI and GPT partitioning pre-installed by the manufacturer? So basically, this SSHD is only really good for extra space?

As long as my original HDD holds up, I should be fine, but I don't know if it will or not.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Your current drive may or may not be failing.
But if it is...cloning from that is NOT what you want to do.

Or, using the 4TB drive to use as the OS drive.
But if you must use that drive...GPT partitioning and UEFI in the BIOS.
But I wouldn't use a 4TB as the OS drive...
 
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skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
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Ok, just for curiosity sake, is there a particular reason why you wouldn't use a 4TB for the OS drive?

Also, after looking at Speccy, it appears that the 4TB is the one I'm having trouble with.

Shows
Read Error Rate: Bad
Reallocated Sectors Count: Bad
and
Current Pending Sector Count: Warning

I wonder if I should just try to reformat it and make sure it's working right before trying to do anything else. Worst case scenario, I could always completely remove it. I wasn't using it - I didn't even know it was still hooked up. D:
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Mar 16, 2013
171,278
17,808
184,590
Huge drives are a pain for the OS drive. UEFI and GPT for one...way too much data lost in the case of needing to do an OS reinstall for another.

My current main system has 5 drives, all SSD.
500GB for the OS drive, other drives for other things.
In case of an OS reinstall...all the data living on other drives is not touched.

And if that particular 4TB drive is showing issues....ditch it!
Bad sectors don't get better...only worse.
 
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Solution
skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
21
0
20


That's a bummer. I was hoping to finally be able to use it, but that's probably what's causing my issue.

Thanks for explaining your set up and why that's an iffy idea. I agree completely now.

That's actually a great set up - I'll probably aim to build something similar; I used to do a lot of 3D modeling and animation work, music stuff, and a ton of gaming. That set up would be perfect for me.

Hey, a million thank yous for your help. This may have actually narrowed my crash problem down quite a bit.

 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
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Mar 16, 2013
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My current drives:
P3ePOPK.png


Top to bottom:
1. OS and applications
2. Photo work
3. CAD/video/3D work
4. Games, VMs, docs, and anything that does not fit in 1-3
5. cache/scratch space for the applications in 1-4, and temp download location.

Really large stuff like video, the music collection, and backups lives in the 12TB NAS box.
 
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skelders

skelders

Feb 25, 2018
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Thanks for sharing! That looks sick. It looks like you and I have a similar workload. I've just been negligent in how I store all my stuff. :p

I'm going to have a new job pretty soon, so whatever disposable income I have after bills is probably going into a build similar to yours. Not sure if I can afford one of the nas boxes, but that would also be amazing. Just the hard drives will be enough to get me through for the time being.
 
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