Problems with my Caviar Green 2TB EARS

I purchased this drive exacly two months ago.

Two days ago, i started up the pc and windows say i haves to format the drive before i can use it.   I ran a few tests with crystaldiskinfo and Lifeguard. here is what i got.

I ran the quick test and extended test two hours ago and i got these error codes.

SMART STATUS :FAIL

TEST RESULT : FAIL

TEST ERROR CODE : 04- Too many bad sector detected

SMART STATUS :FAIL

TEST RESULT : FAIL

TEST ERROR CODE : 04- Too many bad sectors detected

I just ran both the tests once more . Here are the results.

Now SMART STATUS says PASS , the tests FAIL.

I also tried hooking up the drive to an usb dock and got the same results.

I had around 700 Gb data in this drive, it was copied into here from my older drives and i still have them.

I run Windows 7 Home premium .

I have a similar problem as you. The drive has been running perfectly fine for the past week and a half and a couple of days ago, Windows 7 made the drive disconnected sound (I’ve been using it from a usb dock). I went to check under “My Computer” and sure enough, the drive wasn’t showing up. I shut down the usb dock and restarted it, Windows made teh drive connected sound, but wouldn’t show the drive under My Computer and after about 5 minutes, the same format message that you got came up for me as well. As of right now, Windows can’t even see the drive at all and it fails smart.

I dual boot this machine (laptop) and under Ubuntu 10.10 I can finally see the drive under Disk Utility, it is correctly identified as “WDC WD20 EARS-00MVWB0” and it can read the correct size of the drive. HOWEVER: the serial number listed is bogus and is a bunch of 8’s, it does not know the location or the write cache, tells me it’s not partitioned and the SMART Status says “Not Supported.” It lists the device as /dev/sdb which is correct but if I try “sudo fdisk -lu”, the device is not listed. On top of that, if I try to benchmark the drive in Disk Utilities it throws me an error saying “Error benchmarking drive, dev/sdb can’t be found” (can’t remember the exact wording), but I just tried 5 minutes ago and it’s now saying “Error benchmarking drive: the daemon is being inhibited.”

I have about 1.1TB used on it already of DV footage that I didn’t have a chance to backup (transferred from 2 other drives onto this one and was waiting for the second wd20ears to come in to back it up), so now I’m stuck trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

I think it may have something to do with a possibly corrupt GPT Partition Table, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet; still looking around.

@Torontonian: Your drive is listing a very high Reallocated Sector Count which is weird for a recently new drive, I think I’ve seen some others report the same issue. I don’t know if this is the same problem with my drive since I can’t benchmark it or do anything SMART related with it right now  

edit: some extra info:

-smartctl -i /dev/sdb outputs:

----Smartctl open device: /dev/sdb [USB JMicron] failed: No such device or address

-GSMartControl sees the drive as /dev/sdb, “Unknown model” and cannot retrieve the SMART data either’’

-GParted can’t see the device and only lists my main boot disk

Anyone stumble on a solution by any chance?

I plugged it into another desktop I have laying around, it’s recognized at boot in the bios, the correct name is listed, but it’s being displayed as an IDE Slave (I’m using SATA, this is bizarre, that desktop is also running Win 7). After that, the computer doesn’t see the drive and even UBCD can’t recognize the drive and fails to start DOS because it keeps trying to scan and identify the drive :angry:

:cry:

I guess this drive is dead…?

Try the drive on a ACHI enabled Sata port, also try jumper the PHY pins on the drive to put it in 1.5speed mode and try test it again.

I have too many green drives failing lately on 2 computer in my home and several I have built for people. I am losing faith in WD and more so in Green Drives.

Will the jumpers affect the data?

To be honest, I was apprehensive on getting a 2TB drive to begin with. I went with WD because I always trusted them to have the best drives (and I still think that for the most part). This is the first green drive for me and the first 2TB drive as well and it seems unlucky that I bit the bullet on it as it’s an awful lot of data to lose (reasons for not having had it backed up were stated above).

I have all sorts of other WD drive: 2 raptors, 3 640gig blues, 5 caviar blacks just for my personal use, not including the dozen or so hard drives I’ve put into other people’s systems.

I guess lesson learned; always, no matter what, have a backup of your data in at least 2 places, no excuses…