Western Digital: Let the Buyer Beware

I bought a new Western Digital (WD) hard drive.  The drive's label indicated a date (of manufacture, presumably) of February 29, 2012.  It was supposed to have a five-year warranty.  And perhaps it did.  But when I went to WD's Warranty Check site and entered the drive's serial number, it indicated that the warranty would expire on July 11, 2012.  That would be a warranty of exactly five months, not five years.

I wanted to ask WD whether this was an error in their warranty check page, or whether perhaps the merchants selling such drives were deceived as to the actual duration of the warranty.  Unfortunately, WD offered no way to do so.  I spent 20 minutes screwing around in their website, trying various possibilities. 

For one thing, I had to create an account, which I was willing to do, though it seemed unnecessary.  Also, the Support link at the top of their webpage took me to a Service and Support webpage, where I tried several possibilities.  The Warranty & RMA Services link on that page led to an End User Customer page that, unfortunately, provided no way to make contact other than those appearing on the Service and Support webpage.  Specifically, the Contact WD link at the bottoms of these pages led to the same phone and email support webpages as were available on the Service and Support page.

Between those two, the email option led to a page that promised an opportunity to ask a question if I was just willing to Continue to WD Support Portal.  But that was false; there was no opportunity to ask a question on the resulting Manage Your Account page.  Meanwhile, the phone option led into a voice tree that provided no option for asking an actual question.

This was all very time-consuming and frustrating.  I appreciate that WD can make more money if it can force everyone to find answers to nonstandard questions somewhere else.  The exception I would point out is that WD will make less money if those nonstandard questions, or their handling, have to do with the purchase decision.  Specifically, (a) I expect to see a five-year warranty when I am promised one, and (b) if there is an error or falsification on that point, I expect to be able to find that out before, not after, buying a drive from WD.  Otherwise, at a certain point, I would fear a run-around and a possible nasty surprise.  No consumer wants that.

In my case, I don't have a defective drive.  So the standard RMA procedure is not applicable.  I have a drive that I am trying to sell.  I want to be able to assure my potential buyers that the drive is under warranty.  WD is not giving me that assurance.  Had I been aware of this sort of problem, I would not have bought this drive.  It may be great, and may last five years.  Or it may not.  In the latter case, I want warranty coverage, not a hassle.

I will have to discount my drive by some amount in order to overcome reasonable worries of potential buyers.  So in my case, it was a mistake to buy a Western Digital drive, counting on its resale value.  Two months from now -- by which time WD may have sorted out its warranty portal -- the situation may be different.  I'll consider that possibility if I feel like buying another drive from WD then.

Windows 7: Problem Copying to eSATA Drive

I was running Windows 7 Ultimate.  I was copying files from an internal SATA hard drive to an external SATA drive via eSATA cable.  The external unit consisted of an internal drive inside a Rosewill RX-358-S SLV external enclosure.  I was copying files just fine, and then suddenly I got this error message:

Problem Copying

An error has occurred.

The destination you have specified does not exist.  It might be an offline network location or an empty CD or DVD drive.  Check the location and try again.

I noticed that the in-use light on the external enclosure was now constantly lit.  I also saw that the external drive was now missing from the folders pane in Windows Explorer.  I had done similar copying operations in recent days.  This was the first time I had had this problem on this new computer installation.

I did a search for part of that error message.  One thread contained a bunch of suggestions that did not apply to my situation, and so did another.  But I did notice a suggestion that looked like it might help.  To apply that suggestion, I had to get the drive back.  To do that, I rebooted and hoped that Windows Explorer would see it once again.  It did.  So the suggestion, in Vista terms, was to right-click on the drive in My Computer (or in the Windows Explorer folders pane) and go into Properties > Hardware tab > select the drive > Properties > Policies tab > select the "Optimized for performance" option.  I didn't have that option.  There was a write-caching option, but that didn't seem to explain the sudden disappearance of an entire drive.  I could have set Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Advanced tab for best performance of background services, but (a) I didn't want to change the whole system for the sake of this one task and (b) I didn't want to prioritize background services.

I tried a different search.  This Rosewill unit had both eSATA and USB connectors.  I was using eSATA because it was much faster.  It had the drawback of requiring a reboot to be recognized.  One poster indicated that s/he had the same problem as I, but only when using his/her unit's eSATA rather than its USB connection.  Otherwise, I was not finding a solution.  I restarted the copying process, still using the eSATA port.  The problem did not recur that day.  I decided to wrap up this post and follow it with another if the problem recurred.

Wiping a Hard Drive in Ubuntu

I had an old ATA (PATA) hard drive that I wanted to wipe and dump. I didn't know if there had ever been anything particularly sensitive on there, but anything is possible, and anyway I wanted to know how to do it in Ubuntu.  This post presents what I learned in that process.

After a preliminary search, I came across this advice:  "The first thing to do is to see if hpa is enabled."  "HPA," according to Thinkwiki, was short for "Hidden Protected Area" or "Host Protected Area."  It was "a special area (usually a few gigabytes in size)."  The recommended way to see if hpa was enabled was to type "sudo hdparm -N /dev/sdx."  I did that and got this:

625142448/4385456(625142448?), HPA setting seems invalid (buggy kernel device driver?)

A search for that error message led to just a dozen or so hits, containing various bits of information.  For instance, thorkelljarl noted that "The HDD utilities supplied by Seagate, Samsung and some other HDD makers can set the HDD capacity and should remove HPA totally."  NeCod suggested trying this:

grep -i HPA /var/log/kern.log

That produced two messages, each beginning with the date and time and then reading as follows:

ubuntu kernel: [    3.076473] ata5.01: HPA unlocked: 625140335 - > 625142448, native 625142448
ubuntu kernel: [    3.482031] ata1.00: HPA unlocked: 156299375 - > 156301488, native 156301488

I wasn't sure what those messages meant.  I thought the system in question might have been confused about the hpa on this drive because I had booted the system using a live Ubuntu CD.  WilliTo offered some advice pertaining to RAID, but the first two steps sounded more generically useful:

1- Disable backup bios to disk in gigabyte bios if enabled
2- Disable HPA with HDAT2 (disk must be in sata mode not raid)

Similarly, that Thinkwiki page said "If the HPA is enabled in the BIOS (mode set to "Normal"), Linux may get confused about the correct partition geometry."  I tried rebooting, hit Del to go into the BIOS settings > Advanced BIOS Features > Dual BIOS Recovery Source.  That didn't have an option to disable this; it just had HPA or Backup BIOS options.  A Launchpad page gave me the impression that this was particularly a Gigabyte motherboard problem:

Virtual BIOS solutions - like GigaByte motherboards use

This is absolutely CRITICAL. When the hd is unlocked and fully used new GigaByte boards tend to write 1.5 MB at the end of IDE or SATA drives in legacy mode as BIOS backup. Then HPA is activated, every OS has to respect this otherwise it will definitely overwrite data. That's usally not directly visable for the user, but it definitely happens. Depending of the filesystem used for the partition using that last mb will immediately kill data or it will take time till it is filled, but corruption is inevitable.

That Launchpad page said that HPA takes only 1.5MB.  But I preferred not to have it there, for purposes of this erasure.  I had seen another note, somewhere, indicating that the person in question was finding that the HPA was more like 8GB.

Going back to WilliTo's advice, I did a search for HDAT2.  According to its homepage, HDAT2 was a "program for test or diagnostics of ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD and SCSI/USB devices."  A desultory glance at a few reviews suggested that HDAT2 was an OK program.  My next question was whether I could add it to a BartPE bootable USB stick as one more boot utility, but it looked like UBCD4Win (the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows) and/or UBCD had beat me to it.  Rather than pursue that, however, I found that Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) was a simple and highly recommended bootable eraser, so I went with that.