WD Drives - two die at once

Have you tried auto-detecting them in the BIOS?

If that doesn't work, I'd suspect your HD controller.

<b><font color=blue>~ Oh flower of Scotland...da da de de dum dum doo doo.~ </font color=blue></b>

BIOS won't see them at all, in autodetection or trying to force the settings. I've tried standard troubleshooting techniques; I.E. I've tried other hard drives on that motherboard and tried the two dead Western Dig hard drives on another motherboard with the same results. I am mostly wondering two things:

1) How could only the two Western Dig drives die while my other devices be fine
2) How can I resurrect the data on those drives?

Or, if you have some ideas of troubleshooting I should try, please, help!

Ooops! I forgot to state - Other hard drives and devices work just fine on the ASUS motherboard, so I'm reasonably sure it's not that.

Two options.

Try a third drive on the mobo or try your drives on another mobo.

<b><font color=blue>~ Oh flower of Scotland...da da de de dum dum doo doo.~ </font color=blue></b>

Hmmm . . . I guess I didn't make myself clear:

I've already tried those drives on another MoBo, and I've already tried other drives on the ASUS MoBo

try to run WDDIAG from a boot disk. You can get the tool from westerndigital.com. It should tell you the drive status.

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I must have posted at the same time as you, so I didn't see your update.

It's surely the drives. Go with Kief's suggestion.

<b><font color=blue>~ Oh flower of Scotland...da da de de dum dum doo doo.~ </font color=blue></b>

Okay, the 10 gig drive smells like burnt out electronics, so I'm pretty sure something really bad happened there. On rare occaision the BIOS will detect the 40 gig drive, but it only lists it as 8 gigs. Any idea why BOTH of these drives would die at once? Could one make the other go bad? If that's the case, why was no other of my hardware affected?

Hmm, it might have been a power spike. What PSU do you have in there?

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WD makes the most fragile drives in the industry, IMO, so probably just a small power surge that would never have been of a large enough magnitude to kill anything except a WD hard drive.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

May be true what Crash says with some of the older drives but I do not want to get into an arguement with the master :smile: . Although I do treat my IDE WD drive with complete suspicion however as it has been to hell and back and survived some monumental stuff ups along the way. We had to recover data of it after one such instance but fortunatly we had been using Ontracks fix it utilities so it was not an issue. But I s'pose that dont help you any right now. Mind you I have blown and also corrupted IBM's, seagates, and fugitsu's drives and learnt the hard way as usual.
You can actually send those 2 hard drives back to WD and they may be able to retrieve the data for you, and that may take some time and funds.

There is a lot to be said for imaging and backing up you VALUABLE programs and data as I have been told just recently after a bad loss. In future go SCSI drives IMHO if it is that important!

Good luck.


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Thanks SO much for the help. I have a netware server with two mirrored MAXSTOR SCSI drives (you can kiss my fat red fanny, Western Dig!), so luckily nothing irreplaceable was lost, but I ordered a Fujitsu and I'm never going back to WD again.

However . . .

WD does make some darn good software for hard disks. They have a startup floppy that has jumper settings for 90% of the drives out there, and it's a decent replacement for F-Disk.

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I don't know about that, but I know they make the fastest IDE hard drives now with 8MB cache! :smile:

:wink: <b><i>"A penny saved is a penny earned!"</i></b> :wink:

I think WD drive is not that fragile. I have a WD 1.6 gig WD hard drive that have been running for a 5 years without turn off it too often and it still works. I just get 2 120 Gig WD with 8MB cache for RAID and I hope they will last that long too.

I have a whole stack of WD drives hear with suspect PCB's on them. Including ones only a few months old.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?