install wd 400gb sata II drive

[avg1joe]

About a year ago I bought a 400gb sata drive (4000aajs) and installed it but was never able to get it going properly. I had a flaky motherboard and attributed it to that.

I just bought a pcchips a15g motherboard and tried to install windows xp, windows 7, ubuntu and fedora (even though I'm new to linux) on this sata drive. Each of the installs recognized the drive but failed early on.

I finally installed an ide hard drive and installed windows 7 with no issues. After applying all drivers and updates I hooked the sata drive up again. More drivers installed and updated.

+The bios recognizes the drive.
+Device manager recognizes the drive.
-Under computer I have a C drive (ide), A drive (floppy) and D drive (dvd) but the sata doesn't show up.

I've tried sata enabled and disabled in the bios.

I've rebuilt about a dozen old computers in the past few months so I'm not a total tech idiot but sata and the bios settings for it are new to me.

Can someone give me suggestions to try? I need to figure out if this is me or the drive.

 

[Rae1]

Does the drive show up under disk management?

 

[avg1joe]

Sorry about the long delay replying. I was wrestling with a video card issue on the same machine and since I'm going to use this as a htpc I wanted to fix that before getting back to the hard drive.

The disk does show up under disk management.

I had tried to install ubuntu on the drive so I used disk management to delete the linux partitions and then asked it to format the drive fully (not the quick format).

I started the full format on this 400gb sata drive 3 or 4 hours ago and went shopping. I just came home and it says it has formatted 1% of the drive so far. This is with a 4850e amd and 2gb of memory.

Is this a crazy amount of time for a format? Would the computer put itself to sleep while formatting a drive?

 

[Plazzman]

Just a thought but check to make sure your sata jumper on the back of the drive is set to the correct setting that your motherboard supports... IE Sata II 150 or Sata II 300.

 

[avg1joe]

Jumper is all set

 

[Plazzman]

Well my only other suggestion would be to go to WD site and download there tools to test the drive or look for a firmware update for the drive. On a side note I just recently had to low level format a my book pro drive 500GB that was a special WD drive for MyBook Pro and it took about 19 and 1/2 hours..

 

[Smith P.]

Your disk is hosed, obtain RMA from WD and get rid off it.

 

[avg1joe]

Thanks for the advice. I sent it to WD.