Hi all,
I recently asked for some help in a build forum to make my first computer. Well, the parts all came in and I have assembled the beast. All seems to be well except for one big problem: my secondary drive (1 TB WD Caviar Black) won’t work.
I have an ASRock Extreme4 Z77 motherboard with a SSD running my Windows 7. The WD drive showed up in all the BIOS stuff before I got to Windows setup, so I assumed all was well. Once I got into Windows, though, I was perplexed that the HDD didn’t show up in My Computer. Then I did a quick Google search and saw I had to partition and format it. Ok, newbie mistake. I did that and even installed Steam to the drive (though it had some kind of exception error when I tried to run it). After that, it seemed to go fine initially, but upon a restart or two later, the drive disappeared. Now, I can’t format it at all. I’ve tried Windows and I’ve tried EASEUS Partition Master, and neither one can get a successful format going. I’ll partition it (seemingly) successfully, try to format, then fail. Sometimes it will just disappear after that from everywhere including device manager until I restart. Quick formats fail somewhat fast, and I even did an extended format and got a sweet 90 minute wait watching it go to 100% then fail on me the same way a quick format would.
I checked out Western Digital’s site and got their Data Lifeguard Diagostics tool. This is where I get worried. The SMART tool test passes, no problem. But when it does the proper disk quick test, that’s when I get a failure about 7-10 seconds into the test.
Here’s the big problem that WD DLG is saying:
06-Quick Test on drive 1 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 1!
I can hear the device quietly spin when I try to perform these functions on it, so it seems to be working in that sense, but something is definitely wrong. Am I missing a crucial point? Is there something I need to update driver-wise or in the BIOS for this to work right? Is this something that can be fixed at all with software or do I need to return the drive itself? And would I do that through WD or Amazon where I bought it? This is a pretty nightmarish scenario for me being it’s my first experience putting things together and this component seems broken.
Please help!