won't MAKE MY [your] DAY!
Written: Apr 21 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The drive was inexpensive.
Cons: Read this in it entirety. My whole review lies on the 'con' side.
The Bottom Line: Save yourself a myriad of hassles. Inquire with a technician you trust and get a recommendation from them if you MUST install any driver larger than 250GB
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| lkm111's Full Review: Generic Memory Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB S... |
I have probably installed somewhere between 30 and 50 hard drives since my interest in computers became serious back in 1984. I've worked with Maxtor, IBM, Seagate, Western Digital and probably a few more. Never in all these installations did I even encounter anything like trying to work with the new 250GB internal Western Digital 7200RPM.
Beginning with the packaging the drive was a hassle right from go. The new heavy double plastic bubble enclosure required a knife and a practical annihilation to remove drive from package. My thought was "if I have to return this am I going to have difficulty with Costco because of this?"
Next while I didn't really need instructions to prepare the drive and get it ready for physical installation I was surprised to find NO CD of Lifeguard Tools which the box said was enclosed. The only instructions was a small 3 X 5 fold up paper which illustrated where to put the jumper pin if using as slave or master. I elected to start by using it as a slave behind a 40GB Hard Drive that held my XP OS on it. It wouldn't register. It wouldn't show in my computer, it wouldn't show in device manager.
I removed the drive. I tried it as both slave and master on IDE1 and both slave and master on IDE2. I set it to cable select and the other device to cable select, nothing worked.
I elected to try to remove every drive [including both cdrom RW and DVD RW]and test the WD 250GB as a lone device on the system still nothing. I was literally near pulling my hair out
Finally I got it to show up in DLG tools. I formatted and partitioned it into 4 partitions of a bout 62.5 ea. When I fired up the computer it was showing the drive as a master with 31.4GB capacity. I repeated the entire process. This time it showed up as fully formatted and ready to go but the drive read live as 71.8GB. Again and again I tried different setups and re partitioning always to be turned away with similar results which didn't recognize the drive anywhere near full capacity. One one occasion the drive seemed ready to test once more. It showed up in windows explorer so I drug a couple files to it. WOW it showed the files and in the same size as they were KBs from the drive in which I had dragged. I thought "I GOT IT!" In checking capacity I was back to 31.4 once more.
I read where maybe I needed to make sure my registry was set to 48bit divisions for LBA. I followed instructions carefully and discerned that I was now indeed ready for large block drives. However after days of trying everything under the sun I failed to get it installed.
Taking the drive back was the only correct thing I did with the drive from the time I took it home. For the sake of trying to salvage some of my self esteem I got on the net and punched in 250GB WD trouble. I got 7500 hits on one of the search engines. I read a few of the paragraphs and found that many, many other people had experienced the very same thing I had with the WD 250GB internal drive. At this writing my ego has only partially been restored. One thing is concrete now; I shall not again attempt to install such a drive on any of my systems.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
lkm111
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Member: Leslie Moore
Location: Bozeman
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Jack of all trades; Master of none.
Our light time fades; a disaster for some.
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