Hard Drive being reconized as Floppy Drive

The Realyst

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2003
Messages
265
I just got this hard drive and instead of it being detect as a hard drive, it's being detected as floppy drive. I've never seen this before. What could be the issue??? Thanks in advance.
 
Wow..., I stumped hardocp? lol, it seems that this specific WD hard drive has compatibility issues with P35 mobos, which is what I have. RMA time.
 
Compatibility does not warrant RMA legitimacy.

Also, you need to define your problem more... how does the system see it as the floppy? Does it show so in the bios? Does it show drive letter "A:" as the drive? What/How is it the floppy.
 
Try disabling legacy floppy in the BIOS and after you load your OS, change the drive letter to something else other than "A:"
 
It shows up in my BIOS as a hard drive. In XP64 it shows as Floppy drive letter A and most importantly, the drive will not format. Since it shows as a floppy drive, I can't format it in XP64. But if I try to do it while doing a new Windows install, it goes through the motions. The drive trys to format and gets to 100%. But afterward it says that the drive could not be formatted and that there may be a problem with it. I think the compatibility issue is causing this because I have another Western Digital drive (different model) that I bought at the same time as this one, and that one works perfectly. It's just this model that seems to have an issue with P35 boards. And if it doesn't work for me and I paid money for it, thats more then a legitamate reason to RMA it.
 
It shows up in my BIOS as a hard drive. In XP64 it shows as Floppy drive letter A and most importantly, the drive will not format. Since it shows as a floppy drive, I can't format it in XP64. But if I try to do it while doing a new Windows install, it goes through the motions. The drive trys to format and gets to 100%. But afterward it says that the drive could not be formatted and that there may be a problem with it. I think the compatibility issue is causing this because I have another Western Digital drive (different model) that I bought at the same time as this one, and that one works perfectly. It's just this model that seems to have an issue with P35 boards. And if it doesn't work for me and I paid money for it, thats more then a legitamate reason to RMA it.

Go do your disk manager and change the drive letter to anything other than A or B, (or C/D for that matter).

This is a SATA disk and this is the reason why Windows will allow it to be a drive A or B lettering since it assumes it's a removable disk. You should not be so quick to jump to assumptions that it's a incompatibility error when you as the user most likely assigned the drive the wrong drive letter when initializing it.

From your responses it sounds more as a possibility of a defective drive rather than an incompatibility issue, you should run disk diagnostics to confirm this.
 
I (as the user) did NOT set the drive to A. I installed it and it automatically went to that letter. I will try all those things before I send it back. But I don't get why it's such a stretch to think that it might be incompatible when other people are having similar issues. Just read the reviews at newegg. Thanks for your help, but more then likely I'll be sending this back for another model WD hard drive.
 
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