Sunday, February 15, 2009

Geek Challenge: Why Do Tech Gods Hate Me?



















All right, geeks. Can someone explain what just happened to me? I shall explain:

For my one big errand/project today, I drove all the way to Santa Monica to purchase a 1 Terabyte drive. My goal? Transfer all my video files and computer back-ups to one drive so I could free up space on my various portable external drives. After all, one can never have too many external hard drives, right? I plug in my new Western Digital Studio, get the "My Book" icon on my desktop, and then plug in my Seagate drive to start transferring files. The Seagate drive causes my computer to freeze up and my screen is taken over by a grey graphic prompting me to "restart my computer". This is not the first time this drive has caused computers to freeze up.

So I unplug that drive, and reload the Western Digital drive. Now it gives me this screen:








Naturally I do a search on the WD support page and can find no FAQ that directly matches my initial search. So I decide to "initialize". I try both the "repair" and "verify disc" options, but to no avail. I get this message:














WHHHHYYYYYYYYY!!!! How does a product fail me less than 10 minutes after taking it out of its box?

6 comments:

mjmaybell said...

Laura. I also have a 1 TB WD external drive which works fine. This may seem lame, but you have 30 days of free technical support. 800.ASK.4WDC.

Cheers

Laura Swisher said...

Thanks for that, Mjmaybell. This naturally occurred after they closed. So frustrating.

VagabondLoafer said...

I received one for Xmas. Mine came pre-formatted in FAT32 for Windows. I elected to reformat to NTFS for Windows 2000/XP. Perhaps your new drive needs to be formatted (sounds like your "initialize" option?)to comply with Apple's file system requirements. If Apple is anything like Windows, formatting a partition or drive will cause you to lose all data on that partition or drive so one should always back up first. Perhaps you have an option to scan your drive/s for file system errors? Before I'd tangle with WD all day I'd hit the forums and see if anyone has had the same problem. Whatever you do, be kind to your work and back up before trying anything risky. I wish I could be of more help.

Butternut said...

Possible solution It looks like you have to jump through an extra hoop or two for this drive.

According to the Western Digital website they come formatted for Mac, at least the one I looked at. I find that really surprising in this Windows-centric world. Yours might be a NTFS format version though (FAT32 doesn't support volumes that big). At any rate reformatting should clear it out. Should.

tankboy2902 said...

I don't know anything about Macs but I've had similar problems in QNX and UNIX when reusing old hard drives. Butternut, your link seems to have a good answer and I like this one also. It mentions fsck (there's chkfsys and dcheck in QNX) which I've used from the command line and cleans things up. I'd go with that from the Leopard disk and then try Butternut's thing. Whenever fixing hard drives in any OS I always have way more luck from a command line interface rather than a gui.

Bought a 1TB Seagate external yesterday and it was NTFS formatted. First thing I did was copy and clean their software off of it. Who needs more conflicts? I just wanted the drive but that was $10 more. If it runs well for 2 weeks I'm opening the case and using it as a pure sata drive. USBB2SLO.

Laura Swisher said...

Butternut, I think your solution was the one the Mac genius did.

I now live in fear of the Seagate drive.