OMG these WD drives are driving me insane

[judyneric]

Ok, wth is going on with WD drives? I have had 3 WD drives fail me in the past year or so. This is insane. I don't move the computer around, don't reboot it often, don't abuse it. I had a WD MyBook fail out of the box the other day, and I am on my second failed internal laptop drive in the past year or so, plus a failed PC drive about 2 years ago.

Here is my current deal:

I have an HP laptop with an internal WD 500GB drive. It has a C: for OS, and J: for a recovery. The drive is failing, and many Windows processes won't run, and if I reboot, I usually have to do bot from a Vista repair disc, and bad sectors are repaired.

I want to hook up a USB WD 500GB drive so I can back up the entire C: and J: drives and replace the failing WD drive.

When I attached the USB drive, which contained a full system backup from a year ago, it said it had a capacity of 220GB or so.  Well, it's a WDBAAR5000ABK-00, so it's supposed to be 500GB. Hmmmm....

I formated the two partitions on the drive (from a previous system backup), and made it into one partition, hoping that would restore it to its actual 500GB capacity. But, no, it still shows as 200-something GB, instead of the 500GB it is supposed to have. There is no unallocated space.

I googled "WD external showing incorrect size" and found a solution that said to use the WD LifeGuard to test my drives. Easy enough, I downloaded and ran WD LG.

Here's the next odd part.  Drive 1 was listed by WD LG as my internal drive, with a capacity of 500GB. The problem is, the serial number listed for the drive is for the EXTERNAL drive, Drive 2.

Drive 2 is listed as the external drive, but has a completely different serial number than my actual external drive, and a capacity listed as 200-something GB.

When I run a test on Drive 2, which WD LG is saying is my external drive, but has my internal serial number, it fails and gives an error.

When I run a test on Drive 1, which WD LG is saying is my external USB drive, it passes and says it has a 500GB capacity.

What on earth is going?  I'm going to go punch a cow if these infernal WD drives continue to **bleep** in major ways!

[Alucardx23]

Did you tried to write zeros on the external hard drive using DLG?

[judyneric]

Thanks for the suggestion Alucard.

I'll give it a shot and let you know how it went.

FWIW, I formatted the drive overnight (it took hours, did not choose quick format) and it is showing 232 GB.

Will try writing the zeroes, thanks!

[judyneric]

I solved the problem!

It was a case of Stupido Morondos.

The external drive that was was 232 GB available was only a 250 GB drive.  The 500 GB that USED to be in that external drive enclosure is actually in my laptop, thus the serial number discrepancy. Ugggghhhhh  embarassing.

I took the original laptop drive and put it in the enclosure when I swapped the 500 GB out.  OMG at least it's one less problem. I gotta start marking these drives!

Thanks for the assistance though.