WD Hard Drive problem,...I think ??? Long post !!

[RodNichols5]

Sorry for the lengthy post but I have a new WD 160gig HD and I think I am having problems but I need to give some background so that this will make sense.

I have an ASUS A7V333 MB, AMD Athlon Processor, and I am running Win ME. All the HD mentioned are 7200RPM. One month ago I had a WD 60 gig and a WD 120 gig hard drive. The 60 gig was my primary C:\ drive and the 120 gig was a slave to the 60 gig. The 120 happens to be a replacement under warranty from WD as the first one crapped out after about 3 months, this one is fine so far after about a year. Since 60 + 120 is greater then 137 gig, I have to use EZ-BIOS that WD supplied in order to see the full capacity of both drives in Win ME. I use the 120 gig almost exclusively for capturing.

I decided to pull the 60 gig and put it in my secondary computer and buy a new 160 gig drive for my main computer. I decided to use the utilities that WD supplies to copy the 60 gig to my 120 gig and then the 120 gig to the 160 gig. I wanted the 120 gig to be my main C:\ drive as I felt more secure with it being the main hard drive.

The copy from the 120 gig to the 160 gig got an error, something about a directory that couldn't be copied. I decided to use Windows to copy. It was mostly captured files that I had not converted to mpeg yet. Then I used the WD utility to copy the 60 gig to the 120 gig. This went fine, no problems.

After I got the system up and running with the new HD, I found that some of the captured files on the 160 gig drive were now getting errors in VirtualDub and I could no longer use them. At first I thought that the drive was bad so I ran the WD test and the test that Windows ME provides. Both said no errors found on drive. I decided that maybe this was a fluke so I deleted the AVI files that had errors and started capturing again, For the most part, everything is okay, but when the 160 gig drive gets down to around 10 gig left, VirtualDub and TMPGENC will not write to it anymore. VirtualDub says no more disk space and TMPGENC gets a write stream error. In the capture window VurtualDub will show plenty of space left to write to.

Also, some captured files will get a missing index block in VirtualDub when I try to open them after capturing. And some files are just unrecognizable. I suspect that some of the files are getting overwritten as I had one this weekend that I am sure was fine when I looked at on Sat and then on Sunday, I had a missing index block, and the last part of the video is something entirely different than what I captured originally !!

Here is my dilemma, I bought this from NewEgg.com, and I have a few days left in the 30 day initial period. I am considering sending this drive back, paying the restocking fee, and getting a Seagate. I have heard that Seagate is very reliable and this would be the second WD HD to have problems. But, will the Seagate work with the WD since I am using EZ_BIOS to see both drives ? Can I put EZ_BIOS on a Seagate drive with no problems ? I know I should probably bite the bullet and get Win XP but I want to do that later this year or next. Or, is this a Win ME problem and the HD is fine ?

I know this is a long post but if anyone has any advice it would be most appreciated !!

[indolikaa]

I'll give you my opinion. It may not even be worth 2¢ but it might help...


If I had to bet money on where the problem was, I'd put the chips squarely on WinME. You mentioned that you had to run an update so that WinME could actually see through the LBA barrier. That alone makes me suspicious. A lack of native support for any given technology is a free pass for Pandora's box.

[northcat_8]

I'm definitely not a fan of WD. I've only had problems with 2 HD's in my life and both were WD. However, I did not post to bad mouth WD....

WD's EZ-BIOS may not work with other HD's. I was having some issues with my 60 GB WD OS drive and I wanted to image it to a 120 GB Maxtor drive and WD's disc tools and they wouldn't do it. Gave me an error about the drive not being WD. I had to use Norton Ghost to do it.

If I were you I would go with a different HD, but then again I would go ahead and upgrade to XP so you can use the NTFS file system also.

When your 160 GB drive...has 10 GB left...that is pretty full and performance will suffer. Since you are using ME, 150 GB full of files that are less than 4 GB each is quite a few files, you may have some fragmetation issues which can affect both the reading and writing of the files.

In any event, I am with Indo on this, I think your issue lies mainly with the OS, but heavily loaded HD's do not help matters.

On a side note, you have the ASUS A7V333 mother board which has on board RAID. Go buy another 120 or 160 drive and use your existing 120 or 160 and set up a stripe 0 RAID array. I have the same MoBo and I have two 80 GB maxtors in my RAID array and I use it for my capture drive. The RAID will have a much higher speed writing the information across 2 discs than writing to a slave on the same IDE channel.

You want to avoid reading and writing to the same IDE channel or drive if you can.

Your post was freaky because of the similarity of our systems. You can see my specs in the details button. I run the 60 GB as my OS drive, my 160 GB RAID array as my capture drive and my 120 as my finishing drive.

[SLK001]

If you convert to a MODERN operating system, like XP or 2kPro, you won't have the issues you are talking about.

The "Can't Copy Directory" error is a normal windows error when you try to copy protected directories (like the deleted files directory).

[gmatov]

Are you running ME, as you say, or 98SE, as your Details say?

ME is supposed to suck, even as an upgrade to 98.

That's niether here nor there, so far as your original 60 + 120. You were looking at a single 120, and a single 60. You don't call that A 180. They are 2 separate drives, no problem formatting.

WD EZ Drive screwed up a drive for me a long time back, never use it again.

Probably why you can't do a good copy. It writes different, proprietary, disk parameters to the drive.

If you ARE running 98, go to MS and DL the Large Drive fix, named 263044USA8, unzip to make a new boot disk with which to format large drives. Be aware that fdisk still wont show all the digits of actual size, my 160 showed 57000 MB to start, when I got to less than 100 000 MB, it showed, say, 97 000 MB to go.

Just do a sys c: from your a:\ prompt to copy the new command.com and other files to C:\ drive, and you will be updated. Also, check in your Windows folder to see the date of your Command.com, the original is 1998, the new is 04/23/1999.

Your 160 is probably actually anywhere from 152 to 157 GB, so if you are calculating from 160 for remaining space, that could be your error. You actually don't have the space.

As to your corrupted files, try Scandisk, see if it says the files are corrupted, they most likely are. If you want to save them, when it offers to fix them, just say no. If you want it to fix the drive, it will write them as a Filechk 0000, 0001, etc. I have never been able to use such a file, except if it was a text file; part would be readable.

Top advise, use the WD disk to uninstall EZ Drive. But I'd be cautious about it. Without EZ Drive, you may not be able to read what you have now. If you have anything to back up to, do it.

Then again, if you try it with your old drive as C:\, then plug the new back in, you may be able to read it. Since I refuse to use EZ Drive or MaxBlast anymore, can't really tell you.

Maybe someone else can.

Also, if your board actually does have RAID, it must be new enough to recognize large drives. The fdisk/format tools are the gotchas. Update. I have 2 160s and no proprietary tool installed.

Cheers,

George

BTW, if you install a Seagate, remember, EZ BIOS is written to your BIOS, not to the drive. You would be attempting to read the drive at WD's parameters. You can't use a competitor's format tool with it.

[iooi]

Since 60 + 120 is greater then 137 gig, I have to use EZ-BIOS that WD supplied in order to see the full capacity of both drives in Win ME. I use the 120 gig almost exclusively for capturing.
!!

Maybe wrong on this point and please correct me if i am but i was under the impression that the 137 gig limit was on each drive not on the total space of all the drives you had.

[RodNichols5]

Thanks for all of the responses, I now believe that the problem lies with so much GB and WIN ME not being able to handle it.

I have updated my profile to correctly reflect what I have now, sorry !!

As for the 137 GB limit, I originally thought that this limit was per drive, but then..., well here is that story. I started out with one 60 gig, then when I decided to get into video capturing, I added another 120 gig as a slave drive for my captures. When I would try to format the new drive, and I used the WD tools, it would insist on putting EZ-Bios on the disk (I think that is where it put it). I couldn't get Windows to recognize the new drive unless I did this. So after researching, I concluded that the 137 GB limit was for total disk space. I don't know if that is true, I suspect I have it wrong, but that is where I got that idea from. I probably should have used Fdisk and all that but I wasn't real comfortable and WD had this nifty tool to install the drive, and... oh well, that is how I started using Ez-Bios. I will check into the Large Drive fix but I know the best fix would be to get XP, change to NFTS and be done with 137GB limits, and 4 GB per file, etc.

Oh, I should have mentioned, I am using 32 bit addressing, for these drives. I suppose that is obvious, but oh well.

As for running out of space with VirtualDub, I had my C:\ drive listed in the capture drives so that when D:\ filled up, it would go to C:. But the capture would end with a message saying no more disk space, and the VirtualDub window still showed about 28 gig. I think I just need to not push the limits so much. If I have 90% of both drives filled, it is time to convert to MPEG, write to SVCD/DVD, and delete the AVI's. I just had one of those weekends where a lot of stuff was coming on and I didn't have time to convert all of the AVI's before the next capture started.

I will probably get XP to solve all of this.

Thanks for all of the feedback !!!

[SLK001]

The 137GB limit only applies to a single drive. You need to enable 48-bit LB addressing to be able to access above the 137GB level. There is a registry entry that you need to add to enable this.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Atapi\Parameters\

EnableBigLba=1

[gmatov]

SLK,

Rod is uncomfortable with fdisk/format, I do not think you should encourage him to edit his Registry.

Besides, that is what the large Disk fix does, allow 48 bit LBA.

BTW, if any of you want a 160 WD, 2MB cache, 7200 RPM, 60 bucks after rebate, CompUSA this week. Course the rebate is an obscene 100 bucks.

Cheers,

George

[RodNichols5]

SLK001 and gmatov,

Thanks for the info !! This is going to sound weird but I am more comfortable editing the registry than using Fdisk. I guess it is because I have good backups and I know I could always retore the registry. As for Fdisk, it has just been a long time. I did it before when all I had was DOS (anybody remember those days ?) but since windows came along, I would take shortcuts whenever I could. I guess I just got lazy. I should just research and get the steps right. I know you do FDisk and then format right ? Then you install the operating system.

One more thing, I just have to change the registry, and then I can remove EZ-Bios and be able to use the full capacity of both drives ? Does that sound right ? I am sure 48-bit has a limit also, but I should be a long way from that.

Thanks again to both of you !!

[gmatov]

Though you say you are more comfortble in the registry, I would advise against.

Put the WD disk in, choose to remove EZ-BIOS, reboot, put in your boot disk, if you have one, I forget your OS, 98, or ME, A:\ prompt, fdisk, large drive, yes, etc, etc, etc.

If you wish detailed instructions, PM me and I will send them to you, step by step.

Cheers,

George