Is my new HD defective?

[spellflower]

Symptoms:

1. When I tried to partition it, I got this:
   

   Patition Failed: Input/output error

2. Disk Utility seems to think that it's 3.6 TB when I know it's only 500 GB.

BUT:

1. The above only occurred when using Disk Utility running off of a Tiger Install DVD.
2. When I used a Snow Leopard Install DVD, everything was fine. Disk Utility got the size of the drive correct, formatted it, and I'm now running Snow Leopard without issue.

Forum member Intell thinks the controller board is bad and I should return it. Do you agree?

 

[Intell]

Forum member Intell thinks the controller board is bad and I should return it. Do you agree?

I concur with his previous assessment.

 

[spellflower]

I concur with his previous assessment.

I hope you don't mind my looking for a second opinion!

I'm still wondering why things work fine from the Snow Leopard disc, but not the Tiger disc. It makes me think it's the disc, not the drive.

I just want to be sure I have a good case for returning the drive in case I get any flak from the seller.

 

[throAU]

I had a WD 750gb hard drive start reporting as 2.1tb. I managed to get it formatted as a 750gb drive after screwing around with it in Windows/Linux, but it proved to be defective shortly afterward, and had been doing "weird stuff" (essentially, dying when ~550gb had been stored on it).

So i say, RMA it.

 

[Intell]

Not at all. Minds together are (should) be more intelligent than one alone. After some further research, I think the problem lies with the Disk Utility version used in 10.4.0 through 10.4.10. It doesn't correctly query the drive for its size. You'll either have to use a 10.4.11 install disc (none exist) or a Leopard disc to be able to format and possibly install onto that drive. Have to you tried formatting the drive with Snow Leopard's installer and then installing Tiger?

 

[spellflower]

Thanks for all your help on this, Intell! I really appreciate your doing further research.

I was waiting to make a decision about returning the drive before trying anything else, but now that we agree that the drive is probably intact, I'll try reformatting from the SL disc.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if I could just install my Time Machine backup, made off of Leopard, onto this Snow Leopard machine.

Like I said, that didn't work last time (see details here).

But you seemed to think it should. I was going to ask this in a new thread, but I may as well throw it out here.

 

[Intell]

Have you tried running Migration Assistant in the Utilities menu to migrate your information from your Leopard Time Machine backup onto your Snow Leopard system?

 

[spellflower]

Will Migration Assistant allow me to reinstall my whole system with all my settings, or just individual files?

Last night I decided to try restoring using Time Machine to see if I ran into the same problem I had before.

So I plugged in my backup drive, opened Time Machine, found my last backup, and clicked "restore". I now have all my files copied to "Volumes".

This is workable, but I'd really prefer to have all my settings back to normal.

 

[Intell]

Install a fresh installation of Snow Leopard. Then towards the end of the installation it will ask you if you want to migrate your settings. Choose from a Time Machine backup. This will carry over your applications, settings, and user data.

 

[spellflower]

When I did that last time, it didn't work.

Is there any reason to think this time will be different? I'd rather not go through all those steps again if I can help it.

So I guess I have two options:

1. Reinstall SL and try to use the TM backup.
2. Use the SL disc to reformat the drive, then install Tiger, then Leopard, and the TM backup.

What do you think?

 

[spellflower]

Success! Thanks Intell!

So I have no idea why it didn't work when I did this a year ago, but this time I was able to install my Leopard Time Machine Backup onto my Snow Leopard system.

My computer is finally back!