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!!