Is the HDD junk?

[SteinerW]

I have a 500 GB drive that's acting strangely and I can't tell if its any good.

 

The drive is recognized by the bios correctly as a 500 GB WD drive. If the drive is the only one in the system, a GRUB RESCUE prompt or something like that comes up when I boot to it. The drive used to have a windows 7 and Ubuntu in a dual boot setup. I remember screwing up or accidentally deleting one of the the boot partitions, which is why it gets that error.

 

So all seems fine, until I try and boot an OS on another drive with this one hooked up. With windows, the computer holds on the loading screen, doesn't freeze, just holds. But if I try and boot on linux, I get spammed with out of memory errors. I've tried booting from an install disc, both on a sata drive and a usb drive, and get similar results. Anybody know what would cause this or if the drive can be recovered?

[ARikozuM]

I would format it if there's nothing valuable and re-install the OS's that you need.

[SteinerW]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I would format it if there's nothing valuable and re-install the OS's that you need.

I'm not even sure how I would do that. both the windows and Ubuntu installer fail to load while the drive is connected. they don't freeze up, but they fail to load.

[ARikozuM]

Does your motherboard support hot swap/hot plug?

[SteinerW]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Does your motherboard support hot swap/hot plug?

No.

[ARikozuM]

I'd do it, but I'm a stranger.

If you have a friend whose mobo does support it, have him/her help you.

You'll need to plug the power into the drive.

Boot into Windows.

Plug the SATA cable and check "disk management".

right click the drive and format.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, 3DGamerOnSteam said:

No.

It probably does. I haven't seen a board without it.

[SteinerW]

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

It probably does. I haven't seen a board without it.

I'll try it with linux, but I know it doesn't work on windows.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, 3DGamerOnSteam said:

I'll try it with linux, but I know it doesn't work on windows.

You may have to go into the BIOS to enable it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, 3DGamerOnSteam said:

I'll try it with linux, but I know it doesn't work on windows.

If sata hotswap is enabled in the bios, then it will work in almost any os, including windows. 

 

Windows supports hotswap of almost all the parts including gpu's, pcie devices, cpu's, ram, drives, If you have supported hardware and windows version.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

If sata hotswap is enabled in the bios, then it will work in almost any os, including windows. 

 

Windows supports hotswap of almost all the parts including gpu's, pcie devices, cpu's, ram, drives, If you have supported hardware and windows version.

Hot-swapping a GPU would likely be a very HOT-swap... Cold not resist.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Hot-swapping a GPU would likely be a very HOT-swap... Cold not resist.

On supported hardware. 

 

some IBM power servers support hotswap pcie.

[SteinerW]

Alright I found it, I have to enable it for each port individually

[SteinerW]

I tried hotswaping, and the drive won't show up. It's not showing up in partition assistant either. I plugged my other drive in to make sure, and it showed up after about 10 seconds.

 

I'll try it on linux to see if I get anything different.

 

[SteinerW]

Linux just locks up solid shortly after plunging it in

[SteinerW]

Something else to mention is my HDD activity light is solid on while I have the drive connected. Not even a single blink here or there.

[ARikozuM]

I would ask your local PC shop.

 

Are you using a hotswap bay or just plugging the SATA cable?

[pianoguy15]

11 hours ago, 3DGamerOnSteam said:

Linux just locks up solid shortly after plunging it in

I would try leaving it for several hours to see if the OS ever recovers. If you can get the OS to run with the drive installed, you can run a HDD check of some kind. Naturally, you would have to install the tool you plan to use before putting the drive in (since you may need to reboot). I'm a Windows guy, so I would run Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic (free on their website). But I'm sure there are good (or even better) Linux tools for this. Also, Windows built-in disk check tool (schedule it to run at startup) can fix errors that cause issues like this. It's limitation wouldn't fix SMART errors, though, so that would be my deciding factor to replace the drive (if the drive can't pass SMART info correctly, you have no idea how/when it'll fail).