I know that the reason for this is my fault and the warranty is probably void now, but this is the best place to ask…
A while back I was doing some experiments with this hard drive and I was in some utility to access SMART info.
In this program (i think it’s a WD utility, but am not sure), the were some values that could be changed. So, I changed one.
Afterwards, the HD stopped spinning up and I was sure I had bricked my HD. A few months later I plugged it in to see what would happen and still it would not spin up. Just a few days ago, I was in a frisky mood and began again to try and revive this drive. When I plug it in and boot, BIOS cannot see the drive, therefore Windows could not see it either, and it would not spin up. I downloaded the DOS version of WD HD diag, and put it on a bootable flash drive. I rebooted on the flash drive, and ran dlgdiag5. Lo and behold! It sees the drive, and reports it to be in perfect condition! So, I reboot (ctl-alt-del) and booted to windows which now sees the drive. Now the drive works perfectly under windows (even spinning down for a rest and spinning back up when I access it), UNTIL I turn the power off. When I turn the power back on again, the same situation ensues. I have to boot to DOS, and run dlgdiag5, then reboot and all is good. Even the SMART info is great.
Does anyone know what setting I changed and possibly how to change it back??
The HD works great, and I can use it as is because my machine stays on 24/7
It sounds like your drive is powering up in standby (PUIS). If so, then it needs to receive a read or write command before it will spin up. Otherwise, it can be configured to spin up in response to a particular Set Features subcommand.
See sections 4.19 and 7.48.8 of the following document:
The only thing I can think of is that the PM2 jumper may be in the wrong position. WD’s documentation is confusing – some models use the jumper to disable PUIS, others use it to enable PUIS.
According to the ATA standard, the jumper takes precedence over the Set Features command:
“When enabled by a jumper, this feature set shall not be disabled via the SET FEATURES command.”