I’m trying to setup above computer. The installation works fine, but when the system restarts after the initial installation, it hangs at “Starting Windows”. Safe mode shows it stops at “disk.sys”.
It’s a new installation, including a format of the drive. The BIOS (Phoenix 6.00 R1.06 - latest 2011) is set to AHCI and otherwise using the defaults. I have tried several settings, including using a smaller partition, replacing the video graphics adapter, replacing RAM, but nothing makes any difference.
The only thing that works is to replace the HD with another drive, e.g. Seagate. I tried the WD20EARS in another computer and checked it with HD Sentinel and WD’s diagnostic tool, but the drive looks good. It just won’t work with that PC and Windows 7.
To rule out the drive try using Download Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (current version 5.27)
Here are the instructions.
Follow the instructions to create a bootable USB.
Turn off you computer and remove the sata power connector from all the hard drives.
Connect the hard drive that you think may be defective or want to test.
Turn on the computer.
Set your bios to boot from a USB device.
Type dosdlg.exe
Select WRITE ZEROS TO DRIVE and do a full erase.
It should take about 4hrs to 5hrs depending on the computer (2 to 2.5 hours per tera byte).
It not only erases the hard drive but it also checks to see if it is working properly.
if the drive is defective it will come back with an error code that WD support wants for a RMA.
I’m using another drive at the moment without any problems. I can put in the mentioned drive and will follow your suggestions and report back. The drive is out of warranty however. I bought it around 2010, though I rarely used it.
I did not want to put the computer offline for several hours, so I used HDD Low Level Format Tool to initialize the drive, which I installed as a second drive. After that, Windows 7 installed fine. SMART shows no issues. The relocate sector count is still zero. However a low level format has apparently done the trick.
