WD Green Power 2TB Hard Drive Trouble

[dakta]

I have a WD Green Power 2TB hard drive (WDC WD20 EURS-63S48Y0) out of a bricked WD MyBook Live NAS device. I have two different SATA-USB adapters; one a generic multipurpose dongle type and the other a SATA adapter in an external enclosure. I have experienced the following issue: when the drive is formatted using any one of the SATA interfaces, it can only be read when it is connected using that specific interface.

I format the drive using one device, and everything works as expected. When I connect the drive using the other device, the drive is unreadable and must be formatted to be used. Of course, the formatting process works fine, but when the drive is connected to the other device again it's the same story: the drive appears unusable and must be formatted.

All other indicators of drive health are fine: there appear to be no bad sectors, the drive is basically new and has never been dropped... everything seems fine.

I have tested other SATA drives using both of my hardware interfaces, and none experience any issue like this. To add to that, I was able to locate some shell scripts based on WD stuff released with the firmware for the MyBook Live NAS device, which other users claim have debricked their devices, which does a complete factory fresh install (creates partitions, copies over firmware image, sets flags, etc.), which inexplicably didn't work.

The only explanation I can think of is that this specific drive has some sort of hardware interface UUID protection scheme in place, which prevents it from being used with any hardware which was not the hardware used to format the drive initially. Does that kind of technology even exist? Can it be disabled? Or is this drive basically just doomed to only ever be accessible from one piece of hardware, and I'm out of luck if that hardware has any problems or I want to change it in the future?

As far as software goes, I've tested this on multiple computers using Linux, OSX, and Windows, and it's all the same, leading me to believe it is an issue with the drive (and why I'm asking here).

[jono-ats]

Check for an HPA.

[Vulcan]

I have two different SATA-USB adapters; one a generic multipurpose dongle type and the other a SATA adapter in an external enclosure.
[...]
I format the drive using one device, and everything works as expected. When I connect the drive using the other device, the drive is unreadable and must be formatted to be used. Of course, the formatting process works fine, but when the drive is connected to the other device again it's the same story: the drive appears unusable and must be formatted.
[...]
As far as software goes, I've tested this on multiple computers using Linux, OSX, and Windows, and it's all the same, leading me to believe it is an issue with the drive (and why I'm asking here).

The behaviour you describe is typical for one of your USB-SATA adapters not supporting 2TB drives (older ones didn't). I was able to reproduce exactly that behaviour with an old USB-SATA adapter of mine. Further testing to confirm/deny that hypothesis is possible, but different testing approaches have different levels of complexity and some can affect data already on the drive (if any).

[dakta]

I don't buy your theory just yet. Both adapters are recent and rated for drives up to at least 2TB. The drive functions with both adapters just fine, once it has been formatted on that adapter. Unfortunately I don't have a desktop machine with extra drive bays to test my theory with, otherwise I'd test it using that as well as the adapters.

Clearly, I have already formatted the drive multiple times to test this theory, so I don't care about testing damaging my files because there aren't any files to damage. If you think this can be tested, please tell me how I can do that.

As far as HPA goes, I haven't been able to detect any, and even if I could it would not begin to explain this situation.

[fzabkar]

@dakta, until you said that your two interfaces work fine with other SATA drives, I thought that maybe one of them may have been configured with 4KB LBAs whereas the other one may have been setup for 512-bytes.

What does the following command report for the two scenarios?

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X: (where X: is the drive letter)

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu ... sinfo.mspx

[Vulcan]

@dakta,

I don't buy your theory just yet.

I was just trying to help, based on my experience. You don't have to "buy" anything...

The drive functions with both adapters just fine, once it has been formatted on that adapter.

Depending on exactly how it was tested, the same could be said in my case, due to the specific behaviour which I analysed of my "problem" USB-SATA adapter. Even an adapter which "supported" 2TB drives could cause this behaviour, albeit due to a minor version of the behaviour as I saw.

Anyway, since you're getting further help, and I'm busy, and you seem resistant to my hypothesis, I'll wait until you've tried all other suggestions before I spend any more time on this. Perhaps my hypothesis is wrong (anyone can be wrong, especially when doing remote diagnosis - I could test my hypothesis easily if the drive was actually on my bench). If my hypothesis is indeed wrong, I'll save some time when someone else gives you a correct, different answer. If all other suggestions which you receive fail to explain this behaviour, and you are then perhaps less resistant to considering my hypothesis, I'll sit down and write how to do the necessary testing, assuming no data is on the drive.

[dakta]

Apologies if I was a bit abrasive. Just been a bit frustrated with this issue.

At this time, I am abandoning further inquiry. I am going to assume it is a peculiarity of the USB dongle interface, which is older than the enclosure interface and only rated for 2TB where the enclosure is rated for 4TB. Based on that, I've formatted with the enclosure, and we'll see what happens.

For the record, the dongle is a Vantec CB-ISATAU2 and the enclosure is a Rosewill RX-358 U3C.

Thanks for the help.