Problems initializing a new hard drive

[sebek]

I recently purchased a pair of Seagate 4 TB internal drives (ST40000DM000) along with a Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Hard Drive Enclosure to connect with eSATA to a PC I'm running with Windows 7. I set everything up, initialized and formated the first drive without problem and everything seemed to be going well. That ended when I moved onto the second drive.

When I tried initializing it in Disk Management it seemed to be taking longer than it should and eventually gave me an error message saying something like it was given a drive letter but failed at formatting and to try again (sadly I should have written down what the message said exactly but did not). At this point the problematic unallocated hard drive disappeared completely from my Disk Management utility. I tried restarting, swapping drive spots between bay slots, putting the problem drive in the first bay slot by itself, jostling the SATA cable -- I couldn't get it to appear again. Finally after several reboots it showed itself (I wish I knew why) again as an unallocated, uninitialized drive in Disk Management. I went to initialize the drive with GPT and got a Virtual Disk Manager error message saying "This request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." Same result when trying to initialize it with MBR.

After another restart the drive has disappeared again, not to be found in Disk Management since. The other drive I bought is doing great regardless if it's in the first bay slot or second. Have I done something wrong or am I overlooking something? Is it likely this drive is defective and I should return it? Any thoughts are most appreciated.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I'd be tempted to say the drive is defective. It does happen even with brand new ones.

You could test it with SeaTools for DOS which doesn't need Windows as it loads from a bootable CD, but with an "I/O Device Error" which causes loss of communication between the drive and the host, SeaTools may not be able to detect it either.

Even so, it's worth a try as you would then have proof of the drive being faulty. Download the CD Image for SeaTools for DOS from here: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-dos-master/

Use IMGBurn to create the CD from the downloaded ISO file: http://www.filehippo.com/download_imgburn/

Then boot your PC from that CD & SeaTools will open at the end of the boot process.
It is recommended to test the drive using the Long/Extended test which is more thorough than the Short test.

Edit: I just realised that the drive is connected via external SATA. SeaTools for DOS can't access external drives so you'll need to install it internally if possible. There is a Windows version but the I/O error is likely to rule that out as an option.

 

[sebek]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try to run those tests and see how things turn out.