Should I RMA my new WD HD

[Krieger]

Hey guys,

I've been wrangling over this for a few months now. I got a western digital HD a while back and it died last fall after I moved home. Didn't do anything to it, it just up and died one day(I hate how that happens, should at least give you a warning). Anyway I waited over a month to get my drive back, and WD was nice and sent me 7200 rpm 40 gig drive(the one I RMA'd was a 30gig 5400rpm). Problem is a couple of weeks after I was using it I started to get some BSOF's every now and then. I did a scandisk and found that I had about 158k of bad bytes. The drive was only a couple of weeks old, I'd been using it for a couple of months now and it seems to be fine, but I dont want the bad sectors to become a problem. So my question is: Should I RMA the new drive?

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[Wa11y]

If it's already got bad sectors, yeah. If you want to format it, you could try a format with the /C switch, which is supposed to check and clear bad sectors. I don't how it clears them, or if it just makes them "invisible," but I've run that on some floppies in years past, and the bad sectors went away.

You may also wanna visit the WD homepage and download some doctor apps to take a deeper look at your hard drive. But if it's got bad sectors, I'd RMA it. Bad sectors are nothing to play with. Who knows, maybe this time you'll get a 50GB drive!

 

[Arkaine23]

WD RMA

I RMA'd my 40GB WD 7200rpm HDD... it started getting slow, then it would try to run scandisk at start-up all the time. I finally let it try to complete scandisk and bad clusters started popping up everywhere. I couldn't do scandisk from windows becasue it would lock up. I had to do it before windows loaded, and there was no option to automatically fix the bad sectors, so I had to sit there and press <Enter> everytime it found a bad cluster. It would've literally taken me days to complete the surface scan. I downloaded the WD utilites and ran the diagnostic program, then cross-referenced the error code on the WD site. I backed-up what I could, about 750MB out of 26+GB, then did a low-level format (part of the utility) and sent it back. My hdd was only 3 months old. I don't even want the replacement HDD, I want my money back!

If you only have a few bad clusters, be on guard. If you get more, definitely send it back. I'd send it back anyway though, if you can't fix it with a good ole format, or at least the low-level format.

 

[Krieger]

thanks guys, I've been trying to decide on what to do for months. I think I'm going to express RMA it. It sucks thought because I have soemthing like 3gigs of data I need to warehouse until I get the new drive. Also anyone with a WD drive have that install disk? I lost mine somewhere and I downloaded the utils from WD's website and they dont seem right. if you could zip it an email it to me PM me for my email address. thanks again

 

[Krieger]

on another related note. I remarked to my father that if I rma it ever couple of months then I could be up to 100 gigs in no time.

 

[BadThad]

WDC is suck IMO. I have RMA'd more WDC drives than any other brand, although IBM is a close second. I just took back a 2 week old WDC 60GB 7200 because it started with the bad sector crap....unforgivable on a 2 week old drive. Now I have a Maxtor....way better IMO.

You were lucky they sent you a larger drive, in the old days that was common but today they will give you an exact replacement more often than not. I think they keep quite a stock of old drives just for this purpose.