help with hdd problem please

[allthunbs]

Hi:

I'm in the middle of rebuilding my main box with a slight-upgrade motherboard (an Asus P5B-VM). I've accomplished almost everything but I've got a puzzling error and an unknown device. I think they are related.

I cannot access the HDD. It is an 1.5TB WD15EARS-00MVWB0 on SATA2. It shows up in device manager as "working properly". I go to Disk Management to make sure it is available and it shows as "Error". No "Online - Error" as in the Microsoft knowledgebase pages, just "Error". It is formatted NTFS in a single partition. It is coming from an ASUS P5RD1 motherboard running XP64-bit and the same Pentium D CPU and 1GB of memory.

In the other issue, I have the ubiquitous "Unknown device" error in device manager. The error is on "on Intel(R) ICH8/ICH8R Family LPC Interface Controller - 2810". I downloaded the Intel Chipset drivers from ASUS and installed them and it went fine. It took all of 10 seconds to install and most of that time was waiting for me to read the screens.

I've also updated the BIOS to the most recent version 1004 (BETA).

[DanceswithUnix]

Check the BIOS, are you running the port in some sort of RAID mode?

What OS are you using?

You may need to force the port to AHCI or IDE depending on OS age.

[allthunbs]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'm doing a new install of Windows 7 on a scrubbed SATA I drive as drive C:\ No problems through the install.

The problem drive was installed _after_ windoz was installed. It is a single 1.5 TB SATA II. It was originally written under windoz XP SP3 on another motherboard, same CPU. I expect that the 1.5TB is stepping down to SATA I.

All of these drives are individual and not included in any SFT or RAID configuration.

Now the interesting part. Under Disk Manager it shows the drive "Error". When I run Chkdsk on the entire drive, it comes back with no errors. HUH? The WD Data Lifeguard Tools puts the SMART Status as PASS. I'm going to do the quick test but I have to shut down the internet browser. If there's anything significant, I'll edit this message.

[allthunbs]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'm doing a new install of Windows 7 on a scrubbed SATA I drive as drive C:\ No problems through the install.

The problem drive was installed _after_ windoz was installed. It is a single 1.5 TB SATA II. It was originally written under windoz XP SP3 on another motherboard, same CPU. I expect that the 1.5TB is stepping down to SATA I.

All of these drives are individual and not included in any SFT or RAID configuration.

Now the interesting part. Under Disk Manager it shows the drive "Error". When I run Chkdsk on the entire drive, it comes back with no errors. HUH? The WD Data Lifeguard Tools puts the SMART Status as PASS. I'm going to do the quick test but I have to shut down the internet browser. If there's anything significant, I'll edit this message.

The final result of all of this is that the drive was indeed going bad. Western Digital has a free download called "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic". I ran that and discovered that I had a read error part way through the disk. There are two tests on the WDDLD, one short one that takes 2 minutes and a longer one. The error did not show up on the short test but it was bad enough that the long test failed repeatedly on the same sector. It was bad enough to return the drive. Now, the interesting part starts when I tried to erase the drive before returning it. I have three structures, "Data Lifeguard", "Acronis TrueImage" and "Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)". Darik's kept quitting with errors, Acronis crapped out citing an error and "Data Lifeguard" erased the whole drive and still returned the same error at the end. Then DBAN ran the whole drive to RCMP erase standard. It took 60 hours to write 1s, 0s, then random data over the entire disk. I don't know if the read error continues to exist. Without formatting it, I have no other way of testing it and I've already spent inordinate amounts of time.

Hope this helps someone else.