Suddenly my 500GB WD HDD only starts after i pull the SATA cable and reconnect it… To be more precise: I power on the computer, the drive isn’t recognized in the bios. If I pull out the SATA data cable and plug it on again the HDD starts to spin. It is not necessary to plug out and in the SATA power cable. I do a warm reboot, the drive is recognized and the computer starts correct. Once the drive is up and running, I cannot see any problem in SMART or in work. The drive simply runs healthy and perfect as usual. So, it looks like the drive is dropping the SATA start command (if something like that exists). This problem came from heaven after teh drive worked for years. Anybody any ideas to check or configure? Does anybody know the duration of WD’s warranty? Kind regards F.
Try using a software to test like Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
for more information about the warranty try contacting WD
Which motherboard do you have? Which chipset? Southbridge? If your motherboard has two SATA controllers, try switching to the other controller. Do you see any problems in the SMART UDMA CRC Error Count, particularly in the raw value of the attribute?
Some AMD southbridges had detection issues, while one Intel southbridge had a hardware bug that manifested itself as a slow death.
Wow, lucky thing: Being in the business for a while, I’ve ordered a new harddrive from Hitachi due to that strange beheaviour of the WD5000, just to on the safe side of life. I tried to copy the dont-like-to-start-WD-disk to the new Hitachi disk by this Acronis SW, one can download here. Acronis refused to work with an unclear error message. Maybe it only works WD to WD? I switched to Conezilla, which worked really fine. Two days after copying the WD-Disk to the Hitachi-Disk, the WD went to **bleep**. Now there’s only a little bit click-clack as it tries to spin up and then it goes quit. The SMART-indicators were all green a few days ago, even a normal SMART-self-test didn’t show any error. So be careful, if your disk acts strange.
MB: Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H Proc: x86 Family 15 Model 67 Stepping 3 AuthenticAMD ~3206 Mhz SB: dont know no errors in SMART
thanks for the tip 
Your GA-MA78G-DS3H board appears to use AMD’s SB700 southbridge. I’m not aware of any compatibility problems with the SB700, only the SB850.
