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General discussion

Western digital 250GB drive problems.

Aug 17, 2004 5:38AM PDT

W2K SP4 ASUS P4B533 MOBO - current BIOS and MOBO drivers. MOBO supports LBA drives > 137GB.

I replaced a secondary Master Maxtor with a new WD 250GB also as secondary master (on same cable with CDRW). I used Partition Magic 8.0 to format the 250G as two partitions of approximately 125G (D (125G) & F (118.1G)). The primary drive is a Maxtor 80G as C (12G) and E (61G). They are formatted as NTFS.

The formatting of D went without incident. The formatting of F encountered cluster errors of about 25% of that partition yielding approx. 86G free space, with the remainder showing up as used (assumed locked out).

In an attempt to decide what the problem was I tried to load the Western Digital windows diagnostics (version 11.1) and encountered the following error (repeatedly).

ERROR - The Application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005), Click on OK to terminate the application.


I used both the CDROM version and downloaded one from the web site.

Any thoughts on the load error for the diagnostics?

I have built a diagnostics floppy but have not yet run the diagnostics from the floppy. Any other general ideas / thoughts would be appreciated. I want to run the diagnostics before returning the drive.

Discussion is locked

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Definitely run the floppy version. I had
Aug 17, 2004 6:19AM PDT

one [from floppy]give the same message and WD immediately sent me an RMA number to get the drive replaced [repaired]. Apparently that is a failure indication to them in some cases.

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Re: Definitely run the floppy version. I had
Aug 18, 2004 2:48AM PDT

FYI - I was able tor resolve both problems but it was an interesting set of conditions.

1. Could not use partition magic as there was a registry value that needed setting for LBA > 137 support and the WD tools did it. PM 8.0 did not.

2. I had a windows temp file defined on one of the partitions I was trying to create, which either PM 8.0 or some other routine was accessing while I was trying to do the partition.

3. I deleted the partitions and started from scratch using the WD tools and everything worked including the install of the tools.

Still a bit confused but it worked, without errors. I have not yet checked to see if there is an upgrade for PM 8.0.

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Re: Western digital 250GB drive problems.
Aug 20, 2004 4:55AM PDT

Here's my personal opinion toward extremely large hard drives exceding 160 gig and more, get a good pci controller card that supports the drives with those large volumes. If you bought a retail box from a store or wherever being said western digital you would see the recomendation on the box itself.

Not saying all motherboards will or won't support large drives but untill the mainstream is this computer come's with a 200 or 250 gig drive it will save a lot of headaches.

Plus it's a cheap way to add 4 more hard drives to a computer and on older computers you will speed up the ata speed.