I have just acquired a WD 1600AAJS SATA HDD, manufactured JUN 2007 - 160GB.
My desktop is an old Dell D530, P4, 1.5 GB ddr ram. Operating system is LinuxMint Debian Edition.

In BIOS, storage properties, there is a SATA drive of 0 MB capacity with no manufacturer, model number etc shown ie blank.

Can anyone tell me if there are any steps I can take to fully recognise and use the drive, or is it just another ugly paperweight?

Because,

FIIK!

Try it on an external usb enclosure and see if it is recognized correctly on this one. If not then you have some problems and yes you can consider this a paper weight becasue it is not your data inside of there and there is no reason to recover it and fix the drive. What does drive do spin up and down and then stop spinning all together.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

Iorana,

I don't have a usb eclosure available, and yes it does seem to spin up then down and stop spinning altogether.

I've just updated the BIOS on the Compaq dc 7100 (mixed it up with some other computers I play with), but that made no difference anyway. Still knows it is there but will not fully recognise it.

I'm only doing it as a learning experience, but it's always better to learn something that works.

Thanks for your help,

Bruce.

My guess from what you are describing is most likely an SA / firmware issue, possibly failed head(s). Unfortunately not DIY.

Again, thank you.

I'll get back to learning to change the home partitiion to a different hdd under Linux Debian. After looking at some of the posts around this forum, it seems more within my financial constraints.