How do I repair the hard drive? I am running the full erase, I tried scan disk and attempt to recover bad sectors which finished with out errors or saying that it repaired anything. The full erase sais that it is going to take over 100 hours [after 3.5 hours : 92 hours left], so I’m just going to be patient because regular complete formating freezes up my computer and so does backingup to this drive.
Below is the test results; I should be able to repair this without RMA(ing) it; but it may come down to waiting for the entire full write zeros operation to complete however long that will actually take.
I was pretty sure I updated the firmware but, I’ll have to make sure when writing zeroes to the entire drive completes.
It seems there are hundereds of bad sectors on the drive making it impossible to write zeros to it, is there anything I can do to recover my hard drive, I don’t need any of the data on it.
Thanks I started the RMA process but after running the complete write zeros using WD Diag for Windows after about 3 hours it got to bad sectors and couldn’t continue then I tried formating again and I was going to use file and folder compression and complete format but I realized it was going to take 2 and a half days but this time it got to 25% after 16 hours which it could’t do at all before so it might have a chance. Full formating tries to correct bad sectors so it might have hope, I probably won’t have to RMA it I have to hope it can complete the regular format.
Seriously regular complete formatign isn’t any faster than complete formating with file and folder compression thus far, i’ts been 5 hours : 8% . This could be due to the bad sectors possibly I hope that when it is repaired it is normal or this may be normal. I understand that sectors may have become bad because I was backing up to the drive after using the quick format.
I finished RMAing the HDD the new one is capable of being backed up to but these are the problems I have ran into:
When first plugged it in I tried to make a backup copy of the default files on the drive when I did this less than half way to completion the computer froze I was impatient and reset the computer, when I rebooted and tried again it did the same thing although this time I waited longer and it did finish although it has to freez the whole PC during the time it was copying files to my OS HDD to do it. (so it briefly was freezing my computer)
Secondly the first drive I had, I could shut down and boot up the computer with out touching the external HDD. The drive would turn on and turn off with the computer (via e-sata) and I could use the drive. The new drive freezes the computer when I turn it on during the Windows logo so I have to unplug the drive when I turn the computer on then plug it in again when it has boot up to use the drive again.
I did run into a problem where it was freezing my computer so much it couldn’t even run a format in any way. I solved that by using a Windows XP machine I have via USB, the XP was able to format the HDD again then I could use it with my Windows 7 computer.
In conclusion, this is an old drive and is not reliable ie not really compatible with Windows 7 I think it will hold my backup so that I can use it temporarily but overall I am going to have to look at newer external hard drives.
The new RMAed HDD is making my computer freeze and bluescreen now, I have had a ton of problems with these drives now it’s too bad. I can’t use a drive that litterally will make my computer freeze 10 times in a day where when it’s dissconnected my computer is stable all day. I’m not sure if I need to RMA it again or do something else.
