Received my RMA'ed WD Caviar SE 16 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136218 drive this morning. Still can't use it on my firstbuild Vista Home Premium SP1 rig as a secondary data drive.

The first WD Caviar (returned to newegg) wasn't recognized at all by either of my rigs, using multiple ports, multiple SATA power plugs, using multiple proven SATA II data cables. No obvious external damage to either the unit itself or its delivery carton (although it was wrapped in just its static bag with one layer of bubble wrap around it, and then thrown into the same shipping box with two keyboards).

Today's unit was packed the same way, but in its own shipping box.

Okay. Today's drive is seen by the BIOS. (This is my firstbuild rig described in my sig). It's seen by Vista Home Premium SP1. It's seen by the Windows version of WD's Data Diagnostics. (WD's LifeGuard Tools has never been updated to run with Vista). When I go to Manage Disks, the new drive is described as "Not Initialized", and the Vista format Wizard understandably bails-out with "The operation cannot be completed because the disk is not initialized".

Any ideas what to do next, other than RMA this drive, too? Vista's and WD's web sites are silent on this topic. I don't have a floppy drive on this rig to be able to boot to the old WD Tools DOS version to try to initialize the drive. I've tried different SATA II controller ports, different SATA II data cables, and different SATA power plugs (there's no legacy molex power plug on this WD drive). I hate to break apart my working daily-driver XP rig to try to run the WD DOS tools there.

I'm stumped.

...Karl

Have you tried the "Administrative Tools" -> "Create and Format hard disk partitions" on Control Panel?

With that the disc should appear on black background, meaning that it is not initialized. Right click on the disc description and you should be able to format it, create partitions etc. After that the disc should be usable.

Thanks for your response.

I don't see that path in Vista32 Home Premium SP1. Does your path end up at the same place as Vista Start>right-click on Computer>Manage>Disk Management? If so, I've tried that, but that's when I get the abend with the drive not being initialized prior to the format Wizard trying to take over. The drive shows up in the inventory list, as a black bar, with the correct drive size.

Guess tonight I'm going to yank this drive out of the Vista system, then crack open our daily driver XP Pro SP2 system and hook up the questionable drive with an eSATA-to-SATA external cable and also grab a molex-legacy-to-SATA power gender bender and try to use the XP-version WD LifeGuard Tools to see if its strong enough to "initialize" and format this drive outside of the case.

To make this boring thread even longer,...

I brought the un-initialized HDD upstairs to our daily driver, broke open that rig's case, and ended up hooking it up to the last remaining internal SATA II port on the mobo. (The SATA-to-eSATA cable, to hook the HDD up to an open back-panel eSATA port, didn't work for whatever reason).

XP Pro SP2 found the drive upon first boot-up. I right-clicked on My Computer>Manage>Disk Management, and then initialized the new HDD in question, and now it's slowly formatting NTFS. Hopefully, once that completes later tonight, I'll be able to replace the HDD into the Vista rig and all will be happy.

Looks like I'm going to be glad I have the luxury of having one rig with Vista Home Premium SP1 (aka the current "la-*test*-('") and grea-*test*-('")" OS), and a second more-competent rig with XP Pro SP2 (the "one-back" OS), to be able to do the things Vista can't seem to get done (yet).

I don't have Vista at my work PC, but i will check it when i get home.

I am using Vista Ultimate 64bit, so there might be some difference in the options, but i don't know for sure...

Luckily, it's a non-issue now, since I was able to successfully format (and then use) the drive on my Vista rig after I re-initialized it on my XP Pro SP2 daily-driver rig.

Thanks for your earlier responses.