Hard Drive failed - BIOS won't POST - Not Recognized

[Brian Lewis]

Product: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EZRX 1.0TB

Age: About 1 month

 

I purchased this hard drive about a month ago, and have been using it, while being fairly satisfied with it.  I never wrote much to it at all, and had about 5GB of data stored on it as of this morning.  However, after a cold boot today, I could not get past the BIOS POST screen.  My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77MX-D3H if you're wondering.  Now, this could have been anything at this point, so I removed everything from my motherboard and placed everything back, piece by piece, testing every time.  It POSTed past everything until I hooked up my new WD HDD (let's just call it "GREENY" from now on).  No beeps or anything, but... Greeny would not allow me to POST.  I let it sit there for 20 minutes, hoping that it would just be a delay.  I reset my CMOS via jumper and battery, no dice.  Removing Greeny again, I could POST.

 

I then decided to see if I could run a diagnostic test on the drive.  I booted up into Windows and hot plugged it in, but upon checking Disk Management and trying "Rescan Disk", it never appeared.  My next goal was to check "Device Manager" and it also did not appear there.  Nor was it on Diskpart using command prompt.

Frustrated, I decided I'd try a Linux live CD and see if I could see it in GParted.  This also did nothing.

 

Now, the disk is spinning when I start the computer.  There are no clicking noises.  It sounds healthy.  I ran a diagnostic on the drive about two weeks ago, as I ritualistically do to all my drives every month or two.  It proved to be my healthiest drive, as it was the newest.  No other problems were recognizable.

 

So, do I have any options here?  I don't have anything to recover on the drive, so I'm not particularly distraught over it, but a one month lifetime on it?  Jeez.  I've also misplaced the receipt for the drive from my local retailer, so I probably have no chance to return it.  I'm located in the Philippines, so I highly doubt it would be worth sending it in to WD at this point, as it would likely cost as much as a new drive just to ship it.

 

Thanks for any opinions.  And if it's dead... could I get a recommendation for a good storage drive and a good operating system drive?  I'm thinking about migrating away from Western Digital, as I've had numerous failures in the past.  I've had troubles with Seagates as well, but mostly WD.

 

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

Hard drives die, it's just a matter of time. Could be a few weeks, could be a few years.

 

Most retail stores will have a copy of your receipt, unless it is a cheap store.

[.Ruby]

Your drive is most likely a lemon

 

 

If you want to spend more for a reliable drive go with a Seagate Constellation or WD Black

 

Green Drives usually have these energy efficient modes where the needle retracts to save power, they're not the best for performance since they write at 5900rpm and many report reliability issues.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

Even WD Blue is fine. I have 6 of them, never had an issue.

[+Fulcrum Subscriber¹]

Hard drives fail, but usually the error is isolated to the mechanics of the hard drive. If it's preventing POST, then i suspect the issue is a shorted circuit.

 

Is there anything noteworthy on the hard drives power or sata connectors?

 

It looks like you hot-plugged it to the same SATA, and that didn't work, here are a couple other things you might do to make sure it's not your motherboard!

 

Have you tried another hard drive in the same port (SATA/IDE) and Power plug?

 

Can you boot into an O/S, and use an external adapter to see if the hard drive powers on through a USB port or some other power source?

 

Does the hard drive work on any other system?

 

This fault is very rare, assuming it's not your motherboard or due to some accidental use... I can't see how recommending anything less than a purpose-built reliable hard drive, such as the WD Black series would suffice. For most everyone, hard drives are reliable enough.

 

Alas: perhaps you used a credit card and can track the purchase via the transaction id, date/time for reimbursement.

[Ice_Blue]

Have you tried putting it in an external enclosure and hooking it up to another PC?

[#Michael]

I am not going to speak about what kind of new drive to get as it seems you may already have an idea but you really should get the wd green replaced.  WD has a 3 year warranty replacement on it.

 

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp?custtype=end〈=en