I recently completed a format of my WD My Passport 1TB through WD’s quick drive format application. I did the format because I had problems with the drive loading slowly and and sometimes showing 0 bytes when I knew I had files on there. I know the format wipes my drive but I still have problems with it after the format.
Currently the drive shows up as between “Local Disk” or as “My Passport” with “930 GB free of 931 GB” although there are no files on it. Either way, in Properties it says that the device is working properly and is healthy in Disk Management. However, upon plug in, the drive does not pop up and in My Computer would load slowly. I am also unable to eject the drive properly because I receive a popup message saying that “Windows can’t stop your ‘Generic volume’ device because a program is still using it. Close any programs that might be using the device, and then try again later.”
The drive is currently formatted in NTFS as it was when I purchased it. I am using Windows 7 Professional 64bit.
I’ve tried running the diagnostic tool, the quick test passed but I’ve been trying the extended test and it’s been running for close to 5 hours now. Is that normal for a 1TB drive with no files on it since I formatted it? I’ve attached a screenshot because it does not seem normal that the estimated time remaining is 4000+ hours… Would this be a problem because of the drive or the cable?
Yes Joe_S, I have already downloaded the Data LifeGuard, but within the option to write zeros, there are two options, a qiuck erase and a full erase, I was wondering, in my situation which one I should do.
In DLG click the notepad icon to show smart details and post that here, might show something useful.
DLG is actually running an self test on the drive, the drive itself is controlling the test and it stores the result internally. DLG is pretty basic but if smart doesn’t show anything up we can take a look at the self test result using a different program.
Well, never seen that before. That’s indicating there are a critical amount of seek errors. A lot of these smart parameters can never go below 1, meaning they can never actually hit 0 and cause stuff to report a failure, I suspect that Seek error is doing this on your drive.
It’s unfortunate that it’s not being picked up in the scan. What I would do in this case is open a proper support ticket with WD and ask if there is anything else they would like done before it’s returned. Typically they want a printout of a failed Win DLG scan… You could always just try your luck RMA’ing it and hoping they encounter this problem during their testing, but if it’s intermittent you might get unlucky…
I’ve emailed WD support and they told me to write zeros (full erase). I started the write zeros but it is taking an awfully long time. I have had it running for over a day and it is not complete, is this typical of a 1tb drive? The estimated time remaining seems to be going up little by little as well. It currently is showing around 6.5 hours left and as of this morning was 4. Should I cancel or is this another issue?
Well, looks like you got level 1 support and they’re just running through a checklist. Writing zeroes to the drive will not fix your problem and it’s fully expected that it would take days, you have seek problems, which means that reads/writes are going to take a very long time.
Go back to them and tell them that you’ve had ti running for 24 hours already and it’s not looking like it will finish any time soon. Menstion that the drive is reporting seek errors and these errors will cause a full erase to take a very long time, if not fail.
