Solved WD Internal HD showing as unknown drive

[Rick Deckard]

First post on the windows 7 forums. I recently built my own PC from the ground up and everything was running fine for the past month without any problems. I received a windows 7 professional x64 key through my grad school and decided to upgrade my OS (Windows 7 home x64) and shortly after that I encountered issues with my hard drive. Things ran really slow and then my hard drive just stopped booting and in the RAID configuration screen during bootup it shows the drive as an unknown device. I've tried reformatting the drive or just reinstalling windows and in both cases even with my motherboard's driver disc in, it can't seem to find a driver to read the HD. My system build: CPU: Intel i5 2500k w/ stock fan Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Video card: ATI HD Radeon 6870 1GB 256-bit DDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 PSU:CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 650W Hard Drives: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s Intel 20gb onboard SSD Case: NZXT Phantom I've tried searching for fixes to this issue on google and on WD site, but I've never encountered a problem like this before and could appreciate the help. Thanks.

 

[theog]

I would Check the hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools.
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.
HD Diagnostic

I personally would stay away from RAID & dynamic partition, as it seems to more problems than it is worth.

 

[Rick Deckard]

It I'll try out the WD lifeline tool and respond with my results later tonight. Do you think Spinrite could also potentially see/fix any issues?

 

[Rick Deckard]

WD Lifeguard could see the drive but was unable to test it (Multiple SMART errors). I slotted in SpinRite and its currently zero-ing out the entire drive over the next few days. Any thoughts on what could have caused my hard drive to fail in this way so soon after installation? When I upgraded to windows 7 Pro I didn't reformat the disc through bios, but through the windows install disc. Could that have done a bad format/erasure and set up my drive for corruption?

 

[theog]

S.M.A.R.T. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Looks like you need to replace the HD Drive.

 

[Rick Deckard]

Yep, I'd agree seeing how even if SpinRite fixes it, it will likely fail again soon after. Luckily the drive is under warranty. Thanks for your help theog.

 

[Mark Phelps]

Don't rely on Spinrite to do anything other than buy you some time to backoff the drive contents before it fails for good. Despite Spinrite's claims, it can't actually "repair" a drive; instead, all it can do is migrate data from sectors that perform marginally in testing to other sectors.

Your problem is ironic, in a way, because I've been using WD drives for years, and then a few days ago, one of my WD drives in my home server started failing. I ran the WDC utilities against it -- and they failed, saying they were unable to repair it. I've since replaced it with a Seagate drive.