All,
I built a Win7 64-bit Home Premium system with a 150Gig Velicoraptor (WD1500HLFS-01G6U1) as a boot drive. Please help me wipe this drive.
I have been wrestling with a “BOOTMGR is missing” error. I have been searching and following very detailed suggestions for some time and have taken many steps to try to rebuild the boot sectors. I can boot to Win7 with the OEM DVD in one of the optical drives so can download tools, etc. When Win7 boots in this fashion I can see the drive in Computer Management tools and Windows Explorer. Computer Management says the drive is healthy, active, a primary partition, and has the boot and page file, etc. If I install a program it works and shows in Program Files (x86).
I believe the boot sector was damaged during a switch from IDE to AHCI interface. I was trying to re-install Win7 with AHCI specified in the BIOS. Something in the boot sector(s) got whacked!
I decided that rebuilding something as complicated as the boot sectors is a waste of time so want to wipe the drive and start fresh as I was re-installing anyway. However, it seemed a good idea to look at the unit in WDdiag and wipe it there so I downloaded the utility and was bummed to see that the Western Digital software cannot “see” the drive, listing it in the lower pane as a “logical drive” and not a “physical drive”. The utilty sees two other Seagate drives also installed and will run a test on these other units. This is the test suite that runs inside Windows, as I had an earlier boot disk for WD that could not work in Win7.
For some reason I can’t force the computer to boot from any other CD/DVD than the OS on the OEM. Yes, I know how to do that in the BIOS, but the BIOS settings are not forcing the unit to spin up the CDs I have placed in the drives (both tried!) with utilities. Earlier today - while opticals were able to drive a boot - I got a WD boot disk to come up and it, too, could not find a WD disk of any kind. (I only have one WD disk in this machine…) In this case the OS makes no difference. The WDdiag could not see the hardware.
BTW, I ran a Seagate tool to look at the state of the Seagate units and that tool (Seatools) sees TWO Western Digital HDs which it labels (identically) “[deleted for privacy]” when I only have one WD drive and Seatools will NOT see my two Barracudas! Go figure…
I bought the drive in February or March so expect that it is not covered by warranty, but I want to keep it for at least a little bit of extra storage. I think with this craziness I will abandon it as a boot drive.
Suggestions anyone?
Thanks, in advance, for any help.
jonathan7007