HDD Dead, odd behaviour.

Armadillo

Armadillo

Armadillo

Soldato
Joined
29 Feb 2004
Posts
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Got what seems to be a dead 2TB Western Digital Green. But events leading to it seem odd.

Started last night.

I was browsing and got multiple bluescreens. Then my Vertex SSD was no longer detected in bios and when this happened it was blinking red. Apparently this means it's panicking or something.The couple of times I was able to boot, the 2TB seemed fine and could be accessed.

On to today, when I've tried to sort everything out.

To cut it short, everything now works fine when the 2TB is not connected.

2TB connected, SSD refuses to load Windows.
2TB connected with windows on a Mechanical drive, loads slowly but the 2TB is not accessible. It has a drive letter, and that's it. Drive management won't load while it is connected.

2TB connected to another working pc, same deal. Loads, 2TB is not accessible, but as the other pc has never had this connected before, it moans that drive installation for "model number of drive" has failed. Letter is assigned, but that is it.

2TB shows in bios.

If you put your ear up against the 2TB, you can hear it spinning and the occasional thud sound. So I assume it's dead. It also seem to make a buzzing/click sound earlier, but has not done it since.

So it would seem that it's dead.


So question is, why is the 2TB apparently dieing, cause for bluescreens and the SSD to panic? Or am I overlooking something and something else is at fault.
 
yh that's what I meant,it would work in another pc if it was fine

it could have messed up the boot order or something when it died
 
Well it lives, kind of.

Not sure what is going on tbh. This drive + windows on ssd, no boot. This drive + mechanical drive, boot, but no drive info and drive managment cannot find it.

However, after a bit of googling, I tried linux. Puppylinux to be specific and it booted and mouted the drive fine and is currently moving some stuff from it to another drive (my backups are a little out of date).

It did take a while to mount, but as I don't really use linux, not sure how long is normal. So not quite sure wtf is going on with this drive.
 
I had pretty much the same on a 500GB hdd that I pull out of a netbook that came from Korea. In the end i did the same as you, booted up a gparted live cd, cleaned the drive, departitioned and then started again from scratch. Now seems fine under windows.
 
Think drive may be done/near dead.

It still won't work under windows, linux is still fine.

Western Digital's test utility that runs under DOS it finds it, but it does not look good.

Running a quick test on another drive, gets a nice progress bar and tells me alt-x to cancel and is all fine. This drive, no progress bar, alt-x will not cancel and it eventually shows a black screen with the S.M.A.R.T values and tells me warning one or more parameters below threshold. Also my bios now tells me S.M.A.R.T failure-backup or replace.

So I guess it's toast. Although it still works under linux, which seems odd. Also the S.M.A.R.T values are just numbers, how do you interpret them. The one or more parameters below threshold is pretty clear, but still curious.
 
Armadillo said:
Think drive may be done/near dead.

It still won't work under windows, linux is still fine.

Western Digital's test utility that runs under DOS it finds it, but it does not look good.

Running a quick test on another drive, gets a nice progress bar and tells me alt-x to cancel and is all fine. This drive, no progress bar, alt-x will not cancel and it eventually shows a black screen with the S.M.A.R.T values and tells me warning one or more parameters below threshold. Also my bios now tells me S.M.A.R.T failure-backup or replace.

So I guess it's toast. Although it still works under linux, which seems odd. Also the S.M.A.R.T values are just numbers, how do you interpret them. The one or more parameters below threshold is pretty clear, but still curious.
Click to expand...

Get everything off that drive ASAP. There are a ridiculous number of free tools to read S.M.A.R.T. values.

http://www.hdtune.com/ is just one of them. (At least you can do a free trial.)

Pretty sure W.D. have a free tool that will analyse the HDD and give you a code for RMA (if it's still in warranty).
 
Last edited:
Scougar said:
Get everything off that drive ASAP. There are a ridiculous number of free tools to read S.M.A.R.T. values.

http://www.hdtune.com/ is just one of them. (At least you can do a free trial.)

Pretty sure W.D. have a free tool that will analyse the HDD and give you a code for RMA (if it's still in warranty).
Click to expand...

The WD tool shows the Smart values, as does Linux (drive refuses to load under windows), but they are still just numbers, it doesn't actually say what each value represents.

Linux S.M.A.R.T thing says the drive will fail within 24hours. Data is all safe, so doesn't matter.

I wonder why it won't load under windows, but linux is happy to load and let me retrieve data.

Guess I better replace it, this time I will get two for raid, manual backups are annoying.
 
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