steakman1971
08-14-2008, 11:02 PM
I know this sounds unlikely. However, please here me out and offer any suggestions. I recently assembled a new system based on the Asus P5q Pro board. I had an almost 1 year old Western Digital 500 GB external (My Book). This has eSATA and USB connectors.
I started off with USB. Extremely slow transfers - I'm talking almost 20 hours to transfer 1 GB of data. I chalked it up to possible driver or firmware issues.
I've updated my drivers, checked for mobo firmware updates - I either have the latest or didn't see anything applicable.
I then bought an eSATA bracket and an eSATA cable. Still slow, now I have corruption on the external disk (note: I have an internal SATA drive that works fine).
Western Digital diagnostics software reports tons of bad sectors. I may be hosed (I have a backup - but am pissed off about the possible loss of my drive).
Tonight I decided to remove the drive from the external enclosure and hook it up internally. Same deal. I'm screwed. I can partition the drive - but can't format it. It hangs.
I currently have it plugged into my old laptop via USB and XP. It's formatting - but is taking forever. I'm at 1% - took 20 minutes to get this far. Just turned to 2%. Under Vista, I started a format last night and went to bad. It didn't post any % increase in format.
Prior to using on my new machine, the WD worked fine. It has rarely traveled. It's never been dropped.
I shouldn't blame Vista. It could somehow be new hardware/drivers on my mobo causing the grief. However, I'm surprised about not being able to directly format the drive when hooked up internally.
Further note: as I'm typing, I glance at my laptop on occasion. It's now 5% formatted. So, it seems to work (although not sure how much I trust it at this point) on my laptop under XP - but not under Vista on my new Asus board.
*My internal drive is a Western Digital 500 GB SE2. My external drive is the same. However, they do have different model numbers. I scanned WD's websites for any issues - didn't see any. I wonder if it's the firmware in the external hd causing me grief?
I started off with USB. Extremely slow transfers - I'm talking almost 20 hours to transfer 1 GB of data. I chalked it up to possible driver or firmware issues.
I've updated my drivers, checked for mobo firmware updates - I either have the latest or didn't see anything applicable.
I then bought an eSATA bracket and an eSATA cable. Still slow, now I have corruption on the external disk (note: I have an internal SATA drive that works fine).
Western Digital diagnostics software reports tons of bad sectors. I may be hosed (I have a backup - but am pissed off about the possible loss of my drive).
Tonight I decided to remove the drive from the external enclosure and hook it up internally. Same deal. I'm screwed. I can partition the drive - but can't format it. It hangs.
I currently have it plugged into my old laptop via USB and XP. It's formatting - but is taking forever. I'm at 1% - took 20 minutes to get this far. Just turned to 2%. Under Vista, I started a format last night and went to bad. It didn't post any % increase in format.
Prior to using on my new machine, the WD worked fine. It has rarely traveled. It's never been dropped.
I shouldn't blame Vista. It could somehow be new hardware/drivers on my mobo causing the grief. However, I'm surprised about not being able to directly format the drive when hooked up internally.
Further note: as I'm typing, I glance at my laptop on occasion. It's now 5% formatted. So, it seems to work (although not sure how much I trust it at this point) on my laptop under XP - but not under Vista on my new Asus board.
*My internal drive is a Western Digital 500 GB SE2. My external drive is the same. However, they do have different model numbers. I scanned WD's websites for any issues - didn't see any. I wonder if it's the firmware in the external hd causing me grief?