Hello,
it's me again and again with hardware related problem. Jeez, ym comp is really getting old.
First it was motherboard. It had to be replaced.
Recently it came down to graphic card. Replaced again. Actually yesterday.
Now I have problem with hard disk drive. It's used piece I was able to gain today but according to person I got it from should be working. It's no ten years old piece of crap but it doesn't work nonetheless. Concretely it's WD7500AAKS drive.
I plugged it in and BIOS recognize it just fine but then problems starts. With this disk plugged loading of Windows (it's XP btw.) takes much longer then without it. Like 5 minutes instead of half a minute. Then the disk appear in Device Manager, using the same drivers as others drives, and marked as working fine. But in Disk Administrator it's nowhere to be found and nothing seems to work to make it appear there.
I found some strange advice about trojan or malware causing this but no trojan hunter found any.
I tried to change some settings in BIOS, plug it into other SATA and remove other drives for possible conflicts but nothing helped.
I also tried to format it using booting CD but it gets stuck even before it lists available drives.

Is someone aware of possible fix or something?
Thank you in advance!

Hello you again, I'm not sure we've met.

I'm afraid it sounds as though your hard drive has died. XP will try very hard to get devices to work, often to their own detriment, as it's hitting the failing drive quite hard.

If you have a linux boot disk (or the capacity to make one) then I'd advise doing that, and seeing if you can access it from there (that's too bif a topic for this, but a quick search should help you) . If so, DD your data off that drive and ditch it.

Sorry that I've only been able to tell you the obvious, but by the sound of it you need it telling. When an HDD starts going funny, get the data off it and run.

Well, maybe you could try something like Spinrite, or a standard "CHKDSK X: /R" from the command prompt to check the hard disk' sectors health...

You are saying that when you right click "My Computer", click Manage, the Computer Management dialog window comes up but it has no Disk Management icon under the Storage group?

Edit: First I would double click My Computer, right click the drive, click Properties, click the Tools tab and run the error check by checking both options. I am assuming windows does see the drive of course . . . =)

BTW You can run the disk management console manually by opening the run dialog and typing diskmgmt.msc then press enter. (Windows key + R open the run dialog)

Also check that you have the drive set to Slave on the drive, your boot disk would be the master. It may just be a case of Windows trying to figure out which is the boot drive if both are set to Master. If your current drive is set to Cable Select (CS) I would set the new drive to CS as well since your system supports CS . . . =)

That I suspected and was afraid of. I just don't want to admit it yet.
Luckily I have no data on the disk. One guy sold it to me on Thursday. He claimed it's working but it seems either he was plainly lying or haven't tried it at all.
One thing I noticed, PC has problems too power up with disk connected. Like I have to press power button few times (4-5), because on first attempts with disc connected it started to load but then stopped after second or so. I have old PSU but there never were any problems with it.
Could this be caused by power usage of disk? But the PSU is used to keep 4 drives running and I tried to disconnect all other drives and it still has problems.

This HDD has a (normal) power usage of 8-10W.

could you please list the main components of your config ?

maybe you can try •Advanced Format Software - •Data Lifeguard Diagnostic
from western digital itself. and if that doesnt work some other diagnostic program
so you can be sure it's an error or your drive or not.
i'd suspect more a wrong setting or something like that.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?modelno=WD7500AAKS&x=6&y=14

Hm, Data Lifeguard Diagnostic proved quite useful. It was only appliaction able to get something from the disk. Disk easily passed SMART tests but as soon as extended test starts everything goes wrong. It has so many bad sectors it stops test after few minutes. And when I tried to write zero on the disc I get like hundred errors in first few thousand sectors (from 1,5 billions). Seems pretty screwed. And pretty convenient for the guy who sold me it, that the warrancy ended 20 days ago. Not suspicious at all.

well, this is indeed a bad omen.

You can always try a low level format ( using Acronis f.i. : http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en) or the "writing zero" option of the diagnostic tools. That should mark all bad sectors and remap them. ) But there is little chance that the cause of widespread bad sectors would not be hardware related...