HD failure or Windows 7 failure?

karkalec · 13 Sep 2010

Startup Repair ran all night and after 12 hours I canceled it. Didn't seem like it was going to end.

I checked connections on the drive end but not the board end. I will check that next.

Thanks,

Justin

Night Hawk · 13 Sep 2010

When the cable end was lifted here that had just followed a periodic cleaning of the case with a can of air cleaner. It didn't take much and the drive was still listed on the post screen and in the bios but not seen in the Disk Management tool as well as in any explorer window. And then it would be for a short time!

If that doesn't see anything immediately you may want to try a new cable in case that what it needs. The drive end in particular always seems to be on tight since there's no room in there for slack while the ports down on the board tend to. All it needs is to be lifted just a little if that's where the problem is.

For something like that you could run the startup repair for a month and not get anywhere. Hopefully it will prove to be a minor annoyance like this rather then the need to replace the drive itself.

karkalec · 13 Sep 2010

I checked the board end of the cable and reseated it and the computer still won't boot up. Now I'm running chkdsk f/r/ to see if it will find any disk errors. If that doesn't work I'm inclined to return the drive since it is under warranty.

Night Hawk · 13 Sep 2010

If you already ran the WD LifeGuard diagnostics utility and got nowhere with that the cable was more or less the last item to see if the cable itself was lifted out a little or bad. Trying another one would be the idea to rule that out while you may have simply gotten into a defective drive to start with.

karkalec · 13 Sep 2010

Thanks for the help everyone. I ran chkdsk for an hour and it was at 1% checked after that. I'm kind of tired of the whole thing and pretty convinced the drive is bad, so I got the RMA and WD is sending out a replacement. I appreciate what a great resource the folks on this forum are.

Justin

Night Hawk · 13 Sep 2010

Sorry to hear that turned out to be the circumstance for you there. But at least you will be getting a replacement pronto which will be a big help.