3rd Master hard disk error

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-09-30 14:50)Jedi Wrote:  PS: The harddrive is this: Western Digital Caviar® Green 1,5TB
SATA 3Gb/sec, RPM = IntelliPower, 64MB, Product name : WD15EARS

I had one of those fail, although I suspect mine was broken when I got it - there were LOADS of bad sectors after about 1.1TB, it showed up the first time I wrote that far in the drive. It was a data drive, so I could back up all but 2 files and get they sent me a new one.

(2012-09-30 14:59)Tommer Wrote:  Shouldn't the non-windows drives be set to slaves?

No. Master/Slave is purely to do with 2 plug IDE cables as 1 drive has to be set to master and the other to slave. The windows drive should probably be master (not vital afaik) but the really important thing is to have the fastest drive set to master.

I dunno what it means by "3rd Master Hard Disk Error" though - either it's a throwback to IDE terminology or its some crazy SATA controller (which is entirely possible as it's an Intel chipset). SATA doesn't normally have master/slave, because each cable & connector is a dedicated lane.

(2012-09-30 14:59)Tommer Wrote:  Is it a solid state or an actual hard disk?

It's 1.5TB, so it's a HDD.



I'm guessing the failing drive is a data drive plugged into SATA3 (with Windows on SATA1 and optical on SATA4)? If so, you won't need to reinstall windows, just get a replacement drive.

Unfortunately, if the motherboard is refusing to add the errored drive, there's nothing you can do to get the data off it afaik, without paying a lot of money for professional data recovery. If you haven't backed it up, you should have as soon as you started having problems with it.

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(2012-09-30 15:15)Jedi Wrote:  Hmmm this is strange, now it has booted up as well but it works quite slow.

Back it up now.

Once your data is backed up, download and run Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic - that will tell you what's wrong with it and WD will want to use the output from that for a warranty return (assuming it's still in warranty)