Windows 32-bit: My two-year old 320GB Caviar Blue PATA drive makes stuttering noises occasionally on boot so to fix it I updated to the WD WinDiag utility v1.29. WinDiag v1.27 ran without troubles 9-10 months ago.
However, this time I am getting a ReadCapacity failed! error message on software start afterwhich the software terminates. The prior version also reported the error but would not terminate like v1.29 so I decided to not try and run it.
Ran CHKDSK (with /F) and Diskeeper 10 Pro to correct any “surface” problems but had no effect as the error remains. Am working on getting the DOS version to boot from USB flash now on this older system.
Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
If the application crashes there’s not much that can be done to force it to run if you have already returned to the previous version. On this particular case I’d recommend testing your hard drive’s health and SMART status using a different application from the Internet.
Running the older version (shows error but drive listing still appears) reported SMART passed although some values were large. I reviewed the WD support site and found a list of WinDiag error codes and this item had no number nor was listed at all.
Would running the DOS version of the tool work better since there is no active OS to worry about?
Will look for other SMART tool online.
The SMART results of the DOS version will be the same as the Windows version since the application will test the unit as expected once it runs.
