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WD 1TB upgrade problem.

D

djwirk

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 28, 2009
33
0
Last night I upgraded th HDD in my 2009 15" Unibody.
I put the drive in an external enclosure and used Carbon Copy Cloner beforehand, cloned the drive, etc. and all went well. Afterwords I replaced the drive and booted up. Immediatly problems popped up, finder timed out a few times, and other oddities forced me to hard reboot a few times. I assumed something may have gone wrong with the clone so put in my Snow Lep CD and tried to do a clean install on the drive Wichita crashed on me three times. Frustrated I plugged my old drive into the USB and booted into it hoping to try CCC again, however the 1 TB seems to have problems remaining mounted when it is in the internal bay. Tried it a few times, the drive will mount on boot and I can access it for a bit before it randomly dismounts on me.
Everything seemed fine before the install, this morning I was planning on swapping them out and trying C C C again, running Tech Tools Pro, etc. Just wondering though if anyone might know what's going on? Is the drive likely defective? Is the SATA connector loose? Not enough power to run it properly internally?
Will post the exact drive in a moment.
 
Are you sure the power and SATA connectors are connected correctly? It could be a defective drive, get it replaced and try again with new one
 
Swapped the drives out. Was able to reformat it okay. Cloning with SuperDuper! now, will try to boot via USB when it's done. See if the prob is the drive itself or if it happens again when I install it etc.
 
Cloned with SuperDuper! Seemed like it booted fine externally. Played around a bit and didn't have any troubles. Put the drive in did a permissions repair, opened iTunes and got a chat from a friend, after a minute it hung on me, not a complete crash, just the rainbow pinwheel cursor. I waited it out a minute and was able to reply to the iChat and open a finder window. A fee moments later it hung again, I was able to close the finder window, but not do anything with any of the running apps. Seems the prob only pops up when the drive is in the lappy. Any thoughts?
 
djwirk said:
Cloned with SuperDuper! Seemed like it booted fine externally. Played around a bit and didn't have any troubles. Put the drive in did a permissions repair, opened iTunes and got a chat from a friend, after a minute it hung on me, not a complete crash, just the rainbow pinwheel cursor. I waited it out a minute and was able to reply to the iChat and open a finder window. A fee moments later it hung again, I was able to close the finder window, but not do anything with any of the running apps. Seems the prob only pops up when the drive is in the lappy. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

Get the 1TB replaced. As it's so new, you can just walk back into the store and tell them that it's defective and ask for new one.
 
The 1TB has a different setup that is optimized differently from previous drives. I believe the alignment is different or the size of the blocks are different. This prevents you from doing a copy of the hard drive. You'll need to do a time machine backup and do a fresh install then copy over your backup.

Pulled this section out of the description of the drive.
"WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. WD Scorpio® Blue™ 5200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives from Western Digital deliver lightning-fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption."
 
Let's hope! Will wipe the drive and reinstall in a bit. Trying a fresh install over the copy to see if that works. Hope so, the screws are starting to strip out a tad.
 
Ralzy said:
The 1TB has a different setup that is optimized differently from previous drives. I believe the alignment is different or the size of the blocks are different. This prevents you from doing a copy of the hard drive. You'll need to do a time machine backup and do a fresh install then copy over your backup.

Pulled this section out of the description of the drive.
"WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. WD Scorpio® Blue™ 5200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives from Western Digital deliver lightning-fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption."
Click to expand...


Good stuff :D kudos xD
 
Tried a fresh install of 10.6, hung a few times. Screws ended up stripping out on me. (using the right sized driver out of a radio shack kit!) they are sure soft metal!

Trying a 10.6 install via USB, so far though it seems like problems are popping up when the drive is installed. What's up with that?

Side question, since I had to get fancy with the dremel and convert the screws to flat heads to remove them, anyone know a good place to get some machined sheet metal screws or something online? ;)

will post back later depending on ho things go.

Thanks so far for the help!
 
Yeah, just had a flawless install on the drive via USB. Why is it only buggy installed? Could a drive error pop up like that, or am I having some unheard of compatibility issue here?
 
Same problem, installed fine via USB but put it in the lappy and.... BEACHBALL!
 
Ralzy said:
The 1TB has a different setup that is optimized differently from previous drives. I believe the alignment is different or the size of the blocks are different. This prevents you from doing a copy of the hard drive. You'll need to do a time machine backup and do a fresh install then copy over your backup.

Pulled this section out of the description of the drive.
"WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. WD Scorpio® Blue™ 5200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives from Western Digital deliver lightning-fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption."
Click to expand...

This wasn't my experience, partitioned the drive with mac and windows partitions, ran carbon copy and winclone from my old hitachi 320 and moved them right over to the new WD blue 1tb. no problems, no beach balls.
 
If all this, you're still beachballing, get the drive swapped; sounds defective—I wouldn't trust my data on that!
 
Well, problem seems to be with this MBP. Just put the drive in my wife's unibody white MB and OS X installed fine.
This MBP is still under warranty. Maybe I should just call Apple. That or ebay this one for a Core i5...
 
Ralzy said:
The 1TB has a different setup that is optimized differently from previous drives. I believe the alignment is different or the size of the blocks are different. This prevents you from doing a copy of the hard drive. You'll need to do a time machine backup and do a fresh install then copy over your backup.

Pulled this section out of the description of the drive.
"WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. WD Scorpio® Blue™ 5200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives from Western Digital deliver lightning-fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption."
Click to expand...

Not true. The Advanced Format technology is just to align the drive to 4K instead of 512B blocks. It has nothing with copy or back up or whatever.

Furthermore, OSX is NOT affected by this alignment. It's been like this since Tiger.

I'm using a 1TB Advanced Format drive and I've cloned my 700GB partition several times on to this drive with no problem.
 
I had no issues with my 1TB install either. Used Superduper and all was well.

I take the point about the screws. Mine were very tight (and had some sort of blue thread lock applied), even a brand new screwdriver of the correct size can damage the soft metal screws.
 
Well, since the problem seems to be isolated to my MBP, should I contact Apple? It seems pretty trivial, but it's a big deal to me. Enough to make me want to switch to a newer 13 inch if I can just get the storage in it.

I didn't in any way void my warranty by fiddling w/the drive and stripping out the screws did I? :/
 
While this may not be your problem ... my experience with WD drives teaches me to ALWAYS run their diagnostics and surface scan on any new WD before using it in a system. I have had several brand new drives that contained bad blocks. The OS X disk utility does not do a surface scan. I have used the WD RMA process several times (twice for 500GB Scorpio blue laptop drives and once for a 2T 3.5" drive) in the last year or so. One of the Scorpio blue drives had an ever creeping number of bad sectors. I had to run the WD diagnostics on it for about 20 passes before it finally reached the point that it could no longer "replace" the bad blocks and declared the drive unusable. There are a couple of OS X after market drive utilities that will do the surface scan/bad block forwarding, but they cost $$$ and I was too cheap to buy them. I use an old Dell desktop box with WinXP to run the WD diags. Best of luck ... as the drive densities increase, I am seeing more issues with the "infancy" period of ownership. Once I get past the initial "break in" period, they seem to be reliable. (But, I always back things up!)

Good luck ...
 
gwerhart0800 said:
While this may not be your problem ... my experience with WD drives teaches me to ALWAYS run their diagnostics and surface scan on any new WD before using it in a system. I have had several brand new drives that contained bad blocks. The OS X disk utility does not do a surface scan. I have used the WD RMA process several times (twice for 500GB Scorpio blue laptop drives and once for a 2T 3.5" drive) in the last year or so. One of the Scorpio blue drives had an ever creeping number of bad sectors. I had to run the WD diagnostics on it for about 20 passes before it finally reached the point that it could no longer "replace" the bad blocks and declared the drive unusable. There are a couple of OS X after market drive utilities that will do the surface scan/bad block forwarding, but they cost $$$ and I was too cheap to buy them. I use an old Dell desktop box with WinXP to run the WD diags. Best of luck ... as the drive densities increase, I am seeing more issues with the "infancy" period of ownership. Once I get past the initial "break in" period, they seem to be reliable. (But, I always back things up!)

Good luck ...
Click to expand...

I actually have Tech Tool Pro as I used to do IT work. I was planning on running a surface scan on the drive once I exhausted all other avenues. Will prob start it up tonight though. I don't want to return a good drive so will def make sure it's the problem before I go that route, but so far it just looks like my MBP is the issue.
Will be contacting Apple later today and asking them if they have heard anything like this.
 
djwirk said:
Last night I upgraded th HDD in my 2009 15" Unibody.
I put the drive in an external enclosure and used Carbon Copy Cloner beforehand, cloned the drive, etc. and all went well. Afterwords I replaced the drive and booted up. Immediatly problems popped up, finder timed out a few times, and other oddities forced me to hard reboot a few times. I assumed something may have gone wrong with the clone so put in my Snow Lep CD and tried to do a clean install on the drive Wichita crashed on me three times. Frustrated I plugged my old drive into the USB and booted into it hoping to try CCC again, however the 1 TB seems to have problems remaining mounted when it is in the internal bay. Tried it a few times, the drive will mount on boot and I can access it for a bit before it randomly dismounts on me.
Everything seemed fine before the install, this morning I was planning on swapping them out and trying C C C again, running Tech Tools Pro, etc. Just wondering though if anyone might know what's going on? Is the drive likely defective? Is the SATA connector loose? Not enough power to run it properly internally?
Will post the exact drive in a moment.
Click to expand...

You sound like the same person that posted this issue on the Apple forum (since the post is identical). :) I posted a possible solution there.
 
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