I’ve been fighting with WD Black (SATA 1.0 TB) for several days. When I booted the computer, just as the desktop appeared, there was a message that flashed on the screen. I was too fast to read, but the desktop loaded. Now one of the drives (my I drive) doesn’t show up on the desltop. It shows up in bios, it shows during the boot sequence, and it shows in device manager and doesn’t show a problem. It does not show up on the desltop I have tried swapping cables, replacing cables, booting in safe a regular mode and nothing seems to help. It has gotten a bit worse, cause not the computer, when loading, got to the point where it says “Windows is starting up”, then hangs there. Disconnect the drive and it loads fine. Installed a new WD Blue and it works fine, but I would like to get the Black unit going long enough to salvage some information. Useful stuff, but nothing really drastic.
My set up, and no funny comments please: Win XP Pro running with an AMD 4 core chip, 8 gig ram. 4 physical hard drives and 2 dvd burners. Mother board has 6 sata connectors, so no doubling up. System has been rock solid for several years. I need XP to avoid replacing over 1K worth of software.
Lynn
Looks like you have a dead hard disk.
In majority there is nothing sane that can be done.
For immediate results seek help from a professional salvaging service.
KiloGram, Update on my drive problem, When I installed the new WD Blue, I actually had the same problem as the drive not showing up and being available. Someone on the Win bbs board gave me a link to possible problems. The easiest one seemed to go to Administrator, then tools, then disk management. Find the drive marked as un-assigned or with no number or letter. Click on that drive and find the place to assign it a letter. Worked great and the drive is recognized.
I tried the same thing with the old drive and it didn’t work, so I was ready to junk it. On a lark, I figured I’d try it in my Win 10 computer. Slightly different results. Administrative tools, computer management, storage, disk management. I found a disk marked off line and foreign…Research told me the if a drive from XP is put into a Win 10 machine, it is foreign. The is a drop down there to “import” the foreign and make it native, and now you can assign a letter or number. I did all of this and found all my files on the drive. I put the drive back in my XP machine and nothing. Went into disk management and found a “foreign” drive. I “imported” the drive and give it the letter “I”. I had to reboot to make the change official, and when it booted, I got an error message, then it ran scan disk, and found bad sectors. I replace my “G” drive with my new blue drive and copied all the files from the old drive to the new drive. All 490 gigs copied fine, but I had to do them one folder at a time - several of these were over 100 gigs - movie film clips.
In over 30 years of working with computers, I had never run into this. Usually when I install a new drive, it automatically picks the next letter in line.
All is now good. Hope I didn’t confuse you too much. I actually wrote down what I did, so I could remember.
Lynn
Back in circa 600BC, Solon, an Athenian statesman and poet said “I grow old ever learning many things”.
kiloGram
