Replacement serial ata drive is not recognized by disk utility

[taeclee99]

I got my serial ata drive replaced by western digital. I installed it in the second bay and mac osx does not see it. Disk utility does not even recognize it either. I do not know what I am doing wrong because i installed this drive the same way as the original one (which did work for a while). This is the second replacement drive that WD has sent me and osx does not see either of them. Any suggestions are welcome.

TIA

tae

 

[freiheit]

In my limited experience, WD drives are not worth having (with the possible exception of the Raptor line). But my personal grudges aside, how about this: Depending on the model of the drive, it may still have jumpers on the back edge -- if so, are they set to master, slave, or cable select? Most SATA drives shouldn't have jumpers, but some models use the same components for SATA and for normal ATA versions of the same drive.

When you start your computer, do you hear the hard drive spin up at all? Do you know it's getting power?

 

[taeclee99]

The drive did have a jumper which I removed before I installed the drive.
I read that serial ata drives do not need them. I think that I do hear the drive spinning at startup (it might be the first drive...they are close to each other). Could it be that WD sent me two lemons in a row?

 

[simie]

Have you tried the drive with the jumper in place - It may need to changed from master to slave or the other way round before OS X will detect it.

 

[Bear]

The drive did have a jumper which I removed before I installed the drive.
I read that serial ata drives do not need them. I think that I do hear the drive spinning at startup (it might be the first drive...they are close to each other). Could it be that WD sent me two lemons in a row?

But did y ou read the directions for the drive? Did it say what the jumper is for?

 

[Black&Tan]

Check the Western Digital website to find out what the jumper locations are supposed to be. I find the websites to be slightly more helpful than any enclosed directions...

 

[tubedogg]

The drive did have a jumper which I removed before I installed the drive.
I read that serial ata drives do not need them.

They may not need jumpers but I would put it back where it was. I just got a new WD SATA drive about 2 weeks ago and it works fine in the second bay (on a PowerMac G5).

 

[Bear]

Have you tried the drive with the jumper in place - It may need to changed from master to slave or the other way round before OS X will detect it.

As far as I know, Serial ATA doesn't have the master/slave concept.

 

[simie]

Western Digital Info

Appologies for writing rubbish.

Serial ATA hard drives do not have a jumper block to designate whether the drive is master, slave, single, or cable select, as EIDE hard drives do. There is only one Serial ATA drive per channel (cable), so no master/slave relationship exists.

Note: Power management allows the drive to be powered-up into the Standby power management state to minimize inrush current at power-up and to allow the host to sequence the spin-up of devices.

All Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives come with PM2 (power management) disabled. This setting should be used for desktop/workstation computers. If you are using the drive in a RAID/enterprise environment, and wish to enable power management on the drive (controlled spinup via spinup command per ATA standard), place a jumper shunt on pins 3 and 4.

Note: Pins 5-8 are for factory use only and should not be used by end-users.

 

[taeclee99]

Thanks for your help everyone!

I just got off the phone with Apple. They seem to think there is something wrong with either my serial ata cable or the secondary serial ata on the motherboard itself. As a test I put my boot osx drive in the second bay and rebooted. All I got was a flashing question mark. Now I have to lug this thing back to the apple store.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Now I have to lug this thing back to the apple store.

Have fun... careful not to dent it.

 

[taeclee99]

Have fun... careful not to dent it.

Funny you said that. I scratched my g5 case pretty bad the first time I brought it in to the apple store. Luckily I got my case replaced on another occasion. I will have to be extra careful bringing it back this time.

 

[anubis]

Western digital sucks. I will never own a Western Digital drive.

I worked in computer repair at my university for a year. We kept track of the number of hard drives that failed on the 700+ computers we administered. At the end of the year, the total tally was 21 dead western digital drives, 1 dead seagate, no dead maxtors, IBMs, or quantums. 21 out of 22 hard drives that failed that year were Western Digital

Western digital sucks. End of story.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Western digital sucks. I will never own a Western Digital drive.

I worked in computer repair at my university for a year. We kept track of the number of hard drives that failed on the 700+ computers we administered. At the end of the year, the total tally was 21 dead western digital drives, 1 dead seagate, no dead maxtors, IBMs, or quantums. 21 out of 22 hard drives that failed that year were Western Digital

Western digital sucks. End of story.

Any of those drives Raptors? Those I hear are pretty good.

 

[tubedogg]

Western digital sucks. I will never own a Western Digital drive.

I worked in computer repair at my university for a year. We kept track of the number of hard drives that failed on the 700+ computers we administered. At the end of the year, the total tally was 21 dead western digital drives, 1 dead seagate, no dead maxtors, IBMs, or quantums. 21 out of 22 hard drives that failed that year were Western Digital

Western digital sucks. End of story.

Interesting cause the only hard drive I have ever owned that failed was an IBM DeskStar, and that's the only non-WD drive I've ever had (out of about 20 drives in the last 7 or 8 yrs).

I know someone who had a WD drive that failed but I know more people who have had other brands (Maxtor especially seems to fail a lot) fail more often than WD.

 

[anubis]

Interesting cause the only hard drive I have ever owned that failed was an IBM DeskStar, and that's the only non-WD drive I've ever had (out of about 20 drives in the last 7 or 8 yrs).

I know someone who had a WD drive that failed but I know more people who have had other brands (Maxtor especially seems to fail a lot) fail more often than WD.

I guess a lot of it comes down to the luck of the draw. You seem to pretty luck with your WD drive so far. However, I can say with a lot of certainty that in the long run, WD is a very bad idea.

 

[freiheit]

Interesting cause the only hard drive I have ever owned that failed was an IBM DeskStar, and that's the only non-WD drive I've ever had (out of about 20 drives in the last 7 or 8 yrs).

Don't get me wrong; I had a DeathStar fail on me, too. And it failed much more suddenly and completely than either of my WDs. The WDs developed the slowly deteriorating "click of death" usually when accessing near the end of the disk. I think the DeathStar might have been doing the same, but honestly it was such a quiet drive, I never would have heard it. That's the problem I see with today's ultra-quiet drives -- if they start to fail, you get no warning.

I agree it probably is luck of the draw. Every manufacturer is going to have a few lemons in their production. But ouf of 2 WD drives, I've lost both. Out of 3 IBM drives, I've lost 1. We'll see how long my new Samsung SATA drive lasts and hope for the best.