Hey Guys, I’m hanging my head in shame again, because I hate relying on you guys for what should be simple computer things. This is really, really frustrating me, though, and I can’t find an answer.
I bought a WD Black Caviar 2TB SATA bare internal drive for my Photoshop computer (Dell, running Vista 32). The steps I took for installation were:
- After physically installing it (power and Sata cable), under disk management I initialized it (MBR).
- I right-clicked the graphic area representing the drive, and clicked format. I left the whole drive as a single partition, made sure it was NTFS, and changed the drive letter to “Z”. The format continued until it reached 54% then it hung.
- Upon Henry’s recommendation, I made sure all drivers were up to date.
- Western Digital recommended I download and use a utility (Data LifeGuard) to check the drive. I did a quicktest, and this (also) seemed to have progressed but then stop at the roughly half way point. The final result was something along the lines of “too many bad sectors”.
- My assumption was now that this was indeed a bad drive.
- I RMA’d another in advance, and it arrived yesterday.
- I followed all the same steps with the exact same results.
Now I’m obviously thinking that the first drive was not bad, because it would be too much of a coincidence to have a second drive fail in exactly the same way.
I’m beginning to think: was I wrong in thinking I don’t need jumpers? Was it supposed to be quick formatted BEFORE initializing or something? Do drives not like the letter Z?
There are four SATA jacks on my MB. Are they different? Should I go through the entire procedure with a different SATA connection?
I have no idea what’s going on, but I now have two drives that are both useless and I’ve had WAY too much downtime that I can’t afford right now, over something that should have been very simple.
I’m frustrated because I feel like I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t find what.
I would be very, very grateful for any ideas that anyone has.
