Two dead hard drives at the same time, different brands, different age?
So a friend of mine has brought me two hard drives he coudlnt transfer from his old machine to his new machine he just built up. Upon booting the OS simply wouldnt load them. Even his BIOS wouldnt se them. Running Windows 8 and a brand new bleeding edge Mobo, we thought the drives were somehow incompatible with the mixture of Windows 8 & the new hardware so he lended me the drives to test on my own machine.
Docking them in a USB SATA dock, I can see them (dmesg) but I cant do anything with them. Upon connecting the first drive (WD10EARS 1.0TB): Code:
[181567.830171] scsi8 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0 Code:
[182416.397139] scsi10 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0 |
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New system boards use UEFI, not traditional BIOS, and require GPT partrition tables. You need new partitioning tools to create GPT partition tables. The drives probably have MBR's. ( Just guessing ). So, that might explain why they don't run on the new system board. Do you know what OS was using the drives? That would give us a clew, windoze usually uses NTFS and you need the driver loaded on a linux system to see anything on the drives. Its called ntfs-g3. What distro are you using to 'see' the drives? This link -->http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ might help explain GPT and the tools used to create partitions. |
You can examine the drives with smartctl under linux. Should give a hint on what's going on.
That is, IF you can get the drive detected to a native sata port. Cant use the smartctl through a USB dock. Causes to this could be lack of power to the drives. Could possibly be your friends power supply? The drives would then need low level formatting / surface testing with smartctl or a vendor diagnostic application to behave well. Since both drives died at the same time, the cause should be where they both was installed. I have seen some drives being damaged by heat and/or low supply voltage, (and this getting sense errors), to be fully repaired simply by initializing the whole surface of the disk with zeroes. Like: Code:
badblocks -wsc 256 -t 0x00 /dev/sdz Or without the readcheck: Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdz I have once had a sata cable come slightly loose on a drive in use, (a seagate), and the drive became unable to connecto to. = Damaged by a loose sata cable. If you can see the drive in a USB dock, but not directly connected to the MB, then there is some incompatibility with the sata ports. Older drives doing 150/300 don't mix well with controllers doing 300/600. |
And some malware could have damaged these drives too.
I'd think some issue with power, heat, physical damage or such before that. |
Backup your data and run a SMART long test on them, it also checks for bad blocks.
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Member response
Hi,
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Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifie...ware_Interface Quote:
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Hey they were cheap and had 1 terabyte each. A friend of mine had his die too, so that makes 3 out of 6....not good. Buying these "green" drives was a 50/50 chance of failure...you get what you pay for... make backups often! |
I'd say avoid "green" as well as WD drives.
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WD black: Reliable high performance, slightly lower temp than the WD blue, and you will hear a raid multi-seeq crunch through walls. WD blue: Medium to high performance, some of them run a bit hotter and consume more power, but they are rather quiet. I'd go with a WD mechanical disk every day, but i will never buy the "green" version. Comparing with other brand drives my personal opinion is that WD is above the others, and i've come to the decision to stay away from the SSD drives, because of how and how often i hear of them failing. |
How old are the drives? Were they in continuous use?
One thing I have seen with old drives is that the oil used for the bearings can freeze up when they get turned off for a time. Nothing really wrong other than age. But the system will tend to not recognize drives that will not spin up - they will show up in the /proc/scsi/scsi file (this information comes from the formatter board), but no partition information because the disk didn't spin up. If the data is REALLY REALLY important, AND you have space to make a fast backup... you can sometimes free the stiction by CAREFULLY holding the disk between your hands, and carefully rotating the disk around the center axis of rotation, and hit a hard surface (I like a concrete floor) with the edge of the drive casing. This will sometimes crack loose the bearings and allow the disk to spin up. ONCE. When the disk cools down again it will no longer work. This also has the possiblity of causing head crashes. IF the disk spins up and is recognized, copy the data ASAP. You may not get another chance. I have recovered disks and had them last several days doing this (one lasted several months - until it was turned off again). DO NOT DEPEND ON THIS WORKING. Sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. |
I bought 2 Western Digital WD10EARS drives for a D-link 323 NAS. One disk failed in less than 10 hours of use. I didn't know these were advanced format drives when I bought them, nor did I know what advanced format was when I did. I keep the NAS off now, unless I want to back up. Been trying to decide what to buy to replace them both. WD now makes Red drives as well, specifically for NAS devices. Not sure if I can trust them; or not.
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as a courtesy to LQ, I am following up with this topic...
the seagate 320GB drive works in my slackware machine, so I guess it had to do with what camorri said (GPT partitions) on my fiends's windoze 8 computer... the green WD10EARS is really dead.. even my slackware machine wont boot with it within 10 minutes, and after it passed the initial BIOS checkup, the kernel throws all kind of ata errors.... I trashed it. Ive lost dozens of these green drives in the last 5 years... My opinion, and no offense there: they are pure crap. Absolute trash to avoid at all costs, unless you dont care the thing stops working after a few months or so.. Im not like that. I like my stuff reliable, especially in my server. Thanks for the very educational thread guys!!!! |
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