2 Hard Drives Dead on Arrival?

[Velocity]

First, I'm running an older G5 PowerMac / 1.6Ghz / 4Gb memory / OSX 10.5.2 / 5 internal HDs (using Sonnet's G5 Jive kit).

Okay, the Jive kit and its 3 drives are running perfectly, no problem there. My "A slot" startup drive is fine,too. I've tested the "B slot" connections, and it's fine, but the HD I installed in "B slot" is totally DOA.

The dead drive is a Western Digital Caviar 250Gb that I just purchased. It doesn't appear on the desktop. On startup, the Finder tells me the drive is unreadable and asks if I want to initialize it. I say yes, whereupon Disk Utility launches automatically. DU can see the hard drive, identifies it as "Unformatted Generic Media," but won't let me do anything to it. Says the drive has 0 bytes available. I can't run First Aid, can't Erase, can't Partition, can't do anything to this drive. All buttons are grayed-out.

Other utilities, such as DiskWarrior, Tech Tools, and Data Rescue can't even see the defective drive, so no help from them.

Here's where it gets weird. I just so happen to have another Western Digital Caviar 250Gb drive that I just purchased. I switched out the drives in "B slot," and I got the exact same results. Dead hard drive, "Unformatted Generic Media," 0 bytes available, the whole nine yards. What are the chances of buying 2 identically defective HDs?

Testing the "B slot" one step further, I switched to a WD Caviar 160Gb hard drive. No problems whatsoever.

Is there something about the WD Caviar 250Gb drives that I'm missing? Is there a necessary jump pin configuration I don't know about? I've tried it with and without jumpers in various pin positions, makes no difference, apparently. Both WD 250s seem to be DOA. Help

 

[Eraserhead]

Hmm, it seems it could be a jumper issue if you've played with them, are you sure they're in the correct master/slave/whatever position? Are they the same as the existing drive first?

Overwise they could be two DOA drives, its just unlikely...

 

[Velocity]

Actually, as I understand it, there is no jumper configuration necessary. That's why I started off without a jumper. After that failed miserably, I tried a jumper on pins 1 & 2 for spread spectrum clocking. No good, no change. Then I tried a jumper on pins 5 & 6, which is supposed to cause the 250Gb to operate as a 160Gb drive. Again, no change. I've already contacted my dealer, and I'm writing off these two drives as DOA. Can't keep sweating the small stuff.

 

[PcBgone]

Are you certain your IDE cable is good? Ive had problems before with drives as your speaking of, replaced the cable and it worked fine..

 

[Velocity]

Yeah, that was my first thought, but I attached a known GOOD drive to the "B slot" connections, and it worked fine. After all the testing and swapping was done, the fault is narrowed down to the 2 new 250Gb drives.