NEW WD2002FAEX 2TB showing nearly 50% Bad Sectors

Just bought this drive last week, and would not format using windows vista 34 beyond 54%. I updated my nVidia SATA drivers, as I read about a problem with formatting the 2tb drives, but that didn’t work. I was able to format with a stand alone product, but when I ran check disk on the drive, it comes up as almost half full - only .99 TB free out of 1.82 TB capacity. Is this right? Did I really get a drive that has 46% bad sectors?

More that 50% bad sectors… the only suggestion I can give you is to contact WD to replace the drive

It still sounds like a driver (or BIOS?) issue. Try temporarily reconfiguring your drive in BIOS for IDE compatibility or legacy mode. This should make it look like a PATA drive, in which case Vista should revert to its own standard IDE driver. If the drive then formats and tests properly, this will point to a SATA driver issue. Alternatively, you could test the drive using a bootable CD version of WD’s Data LifeGuard diagnostics.

if its less then 15 days old just take it back to the shop (allways free) ,or RMA it with WD (free normaly) or the website you got it from (not allways free for P&p to send it back) the HDD is half dead (must of taken 2-4 days to do that disk check)

lexxx wrote:

if its less then 15 days old just take it back to the shop (allways free) ,or RMA it with WD (free normaly) or the website you got it from (not allways free for P&p to send it back) the HDD is half dead (must of taken 2-4 days to do that disk check)

It only took 1.5 to 2 hours

fzabkar wrote:
It still sounds like a driver (or BIOS?) issue. Try temporarily reconfiguring your drive in BIOS for IDE compatibility or legacy mode. This should make it look like a PATA drive, in which case Vista should revert to its own standard IDE driver.

How do I do this? I don’t see an option in BIOS for doing it.

just in case you do find the setting, it can make the system unbootable (harmless) if that happens just switch it back to what ever it was set to (AHCI or IDE) just look around the BIOS for it

Hopefully the screenshots in this thread will help you find the BIOS settings:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=32&post=267407