Re: another dead HD, which do you use?

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

Other brands (Maxtor, for example) did not suffer the same problems.

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Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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