WD2002FAEX - Not Recognised In Windows 7 + BSOD

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello

My WD2002FAEX  is not recognised in Windows 7 Explorer.

I’ve read all the relative posts relating to this drive and failure to recognise within the communities.

  1. The drive is set to 3Gbps with jumper on pins 5-6.

  2. Connected direct from SATA  to eSata port on my laptop dell m4400. (The data is NOT going through an enclosure interface to eliminate the possibility of this being the cause of the issue. Power IS being fed by an enclosure interface.)

  3. The BIOS (upto date) ennumerates the disk and lists the capacity as 2000GB

  4. Windows 7 Pro 64bit Disk Management also enumerates the drive and allows me to use the New Simple Volume Wizard. I use the following settings:

Volume Size: Defaults to “1907727MB”

Assign Following Drive Letter: set to “do not assign drive letter path”

Format this volume: defaults to NTFS

Allocation Size: “Default”

Volume Label: defaults to “New Volume”

Perform Quick Format: default Checked.

Enable File and Folder compression: default Unchecked.

The Wizard starts the job, an egg timer sits there for a while, no other information is displayed, I would have hoped for “formatting” to pop up with the drive listing.

When complete the wizard comes up with the following error:

I follow the proposal of the prompt, but this does not help.

I am able to set the partition as Active, but the drive still does not appear in Explorer.

I am unable to assign a drive letter and I am unable to format the drive.

Looking at the Intel Rapid Storage Management utility I have this:

Now, if I reboot and load Linux Mint 10, I can see the drive in gparted, I can see the drive in GNOME as NTFS format and I can access and write files to the drive.

Does anyone know why this drive can not be viewed in Windows 7 Pro 64bit Explorer ?

BSOD  

If in windows Disk Management I follow the same proceedure above but during the wizard I assign a drive letter (“E:”), the wizard does not show an egg timer, but instead says “formatting”, which looks more usual.

But then, when the wizard completes, I momentarily see “Healthey, Primary Disk” and then i get a BSOD and memory dump.

On reboot of windows the same BSOD occurs after loading the desktop.

Does anyone know why this drive causes a BSOD in Windows 7 Pro 64bit after the drive has been formatted with a drive letter assigned in the Disk Management wizard ?

Thank you for your assistance.

2

 

  1. Connected direct from SATA  to eSata port on my laptop dell m4400. (The data is NOT going through an enclosure interface to eliminate the possibility of this being the cause of the issue. Power IS being fed by an enclosure interface.)

 

 

That doesnt sound like a connection that would be supported Sata to eSata?

3

Hello Lawrence

SATA to eSATA most certainly is a supported connection.

I have another drive that I connect in this way primarily because the chipsets that enclosure manufacturers use often cripple the performance of your SATA connection speed or even don’t work at all.

To put your mind at ease I have also put the drive in an enclosure using the enclosure interface and have connected with USB. The same experience described above took place.

Bypassing the chipset of the enclosure I now know that the enclosure chipset is not at fault.

Either the HD configuration, Laptop hardware or Windows is at fault.

Being able to access and write files to the disk via Linux kind of points to windows being at fault, but not being an expert in the field I wouldn’t like to place any bets on it.

Anymore ideas ?

4

Finally I got a response from Microsoft Support directly who asked me to follow this proceedure:

“please try to uninstall the security software and then uninstall and reinstall the Display Adapter Drivers and then check the status of the issue”

I uninstalled MSSE, Malwarebytes and Nvidia drivers, then installed the Nvidia drivers.

I inserted disk 2, but it still didn’t come up in Explorer. Having no faith in the following I tried it again anyway: Went to Device Manager once more and uninstalled the “unknown device” and the “known device” and re-scaned for PnP hardware.

Boink ! It showed up in Explorer and no BSOD.

Disk 3 connected and required no further attention as it was recognised instantly in Explorer.

The uninstall/install process took a total of 30 mins. I didn’t learn a **bleep** of a lot but it was a better solution to hours re-installing Windows, all my software and settings.