Uncooperative Harddrive

I bought a WD800BEVE from a guy.  He claims that it’s “new” - O>K> it could have been a white box drive.  So I put it into my USB enclosure, connected it to my laptop and was going to partition and format it (Linux Kubuntu 12.04).  I’m not getting a good feeling about the drive not showing up - in parted, fdisk, or any of the usual tools.  I run mesg in a konsole which shows a “void” generic disk and which he kernel apparently thinks is “/dev/sdb”.  I run:

sudo hdparm /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 multcount = 0 (off)
 readonly = 0 (off)
 readahead = 256 (on)
 geometry = 1024/0/62, sectors = 0, start = 0

Not a very good result. especially the geometry.  so I run:

sudo hdparm -m16 /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 setting multcount to 16
 HDIO_SET_MULTCOUNT failed: Invalid argument
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 multcount = 0 (off)

 This is not good.  Not being able to set reasonable hard drive parameters is not good.  o to complete the picture I ran:

john@john-laptop:/dev$ sudo sfdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 0 cylinders, 255 heads, 62 sectors/track
read: Invalid argument

sfdisk: read error on /dev/sdb - cannot read sector 0
 /dev/sdb: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found

So the geometry is crewed up and partition 0 is unreadable.  I guess this drive is toast.  Any thoughts, or any WD utilities that I could use on a Windows box that might save the day?

Thanks in advance!!

Hello mate,

You can try to use the WinDLG tool to write zeros on the unit… Then try to create a new partition…

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I downloaded WinDLG and ran it against the drive plugged into my Windows machine.  The utility found the drive and zeroed it out.  I brought it over to my Linux machine and again - no joy.  In the meantime, I had ordered another enclosure for a SATA drive that I bought.  I had no problem seeing that drive on either machine.  Which leads me to the solution.  I swapped the new cable to the uncooperative drive, plugged it into my Linux box, and …

Wait for it …

I was now looking at, reading, and fdisking the now, cooperative drive!!  Unfreaking real.  All this time it was a flaky cable.  Which might explain why it could work sometimes but not all the time.  Well, it’s in the trash.  Both drives work just fine.  And I found that the previously uncooperative drive had four unusual, different filesystems - including QNX.  It now has an extended partion with three nice Linux ext3 filesystems.

Thanks much for your assistance!