WD Caviar Black 1TB Troubleshooting

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!

well mate…replace it…

Nothing more to do, if the DLG test failed replace it. If you bought it less that one moth ago Amazon can replace it for you if not contact WD tech support to replace it.