[Discuss] Unable to partition a new drive = death?

[j.natowitz at rcn.com (Jerry Natowitz)]

My first instinct is to make sure the SATA cables are firmly seated. 
I've seen problems like this when the signal cable is loose.  Some 
motherboards use SATA connectors that flare out very easily.  The 
locking type SATA cables work well in those connectors.  monoprice.com 
has reasonable cables, I buy the 24 inch 6gps cables for a little over 
$2 from them (these are a little longer than the 50cm length 
specification, stick to 18 inch to be within that limit).

On second thought, I googled the model number and it seems that people 
have been reporting problems with it.  You should enable SMART in your 
motherboard BIOS, and use smartctl to check the drive:
smartctl -H /dev/sdX      to check the health
smartctl -t short /dev/sdX  to run a short test
smartctl -a /dev/sdX  to see a report on SMART status (will show you how 
long the long test will take, and whether the test(s) completed)
smartctl -t long /dev/sdX  to run a long test (generally 1-2 hours)

Chances are that you will not need to go through all these commands.  WD 
will take on faith "SMART failure" as a reason for RMA.

	Jerry Natowitz
===>    j.natowitz (at) gmail.com

On 12/30/11 23:58, Doug wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I have been trying to format a Western Digital 2TB drive purchased
> from TigerDirect in March of this year. I have yet to use it to do
> anything, jobs, family and research being what they are. I have a SATA
> enclosure, but the MacOS disk utility on 2 machines refused to do
> anything with it. I decided to hook it up directly to a linux box. One
> red cable is the power, another looks like data, both have those
> connectors shaped like an L.
>
> The linux machine complained bitterly about this hard drive at boot
> time, over 382 lines of complaints, many like this:
>
> [ 3491.211049] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
> driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [ 3491.211052] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Sense Key : Aborted Command
> [current] [descriptor]
> [ 3491.211067] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Add. Sense: No additional sense information
> [ 3491.211070] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
> [ 3491.211076] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
> [ 3491.211078] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0
> [ 3491.450290] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
> driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [ 3491.450293] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Sense Key : Aborted Command
> [current] [descriptor]
> [ 3491.450308] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Add. Sense: No additional sense information
> [ 3491.450311] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
> [ 3491.450317] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
>
> This is what gparted reports:
>
> Model: ATA WDC WD20EADS-00S
> Size: 1.82 tiB
> Path: /dev/sdb
>
> Parition table: unrecognized
> Heads: 255
> Sectors/track: 63
> Cylinders: 243201
> Total sectors: 3907029168
> Sector size: 512
>
> The first step is to go under the Device and pick out
> Create Partition Table
>
> It reports this:
> /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label
> Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb
> Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb
> Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb
> Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb: Input/output error
>
> Not so good.
>
> Am I missing something, or is this drive Dead On Arrival + 8 months?
> Doug
>
> Not related, but I will be doing my MIT IAP course again:
> http://student.mit.edu/searchiap/iap-a443.html
> Same topics, but this time I have to report on the errors in my work.
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