Brand New Western Digital Hard Drive causing problems
Hi everyone its a fairly long tale ...
Today I recieved a Western Digital SATA 500 GB drive. I installed it succesfully and it showed up in bios. Great I though, until Windows Vista booted and the drive did not appear under My Computer... I went into Disk Management in admin tools and the drive was not shown there, odd I thought... I download the Western Digital Drive Guard 11.2 Software to find out it doesnt work with Vista. I downloaded the bootable DOS ISO image and attempted to boot from that when I restarted my computer. It hung just after it finished loading CD ROM drivers, I left it for half an hour to make sure it wasnt trying to detect hard drives and gave up....
Next I downloaded The Ultimate Boot CD (DOS version) and went through the relevent menu's to launch the same software and got the same problem. At this point I was going a bit mental so I thought I'd try the Western Digital Diagostics, and same problem with a crash just after it loads CD ROM drivers. I then used from the Ultimate Boot CD (following a restart) PTDD Super Fdisc to format the drive as FAT32 not an ideal solution I know for a drive of that capacity.
A restart later and Vista booted and detected the drive fine as I expected. I then wanted to format the drive to NTFS (not a quick format) so I started the process in Disc Manager and I walked off and left it for 2 hours to find it had done 2% of the disc. I thought this was a bit odd due to drives smaller in capacity taking far less time so I stopped the format and restarted. I then tried the same process again for 2 and a half hours this time and got the same result.
I restarted and the drive was then not picked up by Vista. I went back to the ultimate boot cd and formatted the drive as FAT32 using the same tool to be informed the disk contained bad sectors throughout. At this point I have given up and thought someone might be able to suggest something to help me out with this problem.
Thanks for reading if you got this far.
