External hard drive

not sure if "stiction" affects post-90s drive?

it needs to show in device manager / disk management before it will show in file explorer.

Thank you. It shows in device manager, so I assume this rules out incompatibility of the power supply. Status = this device is working properly. It does not show in file explorer. Will this be because it is not formatted? How do I format it if it does not show in file explorer? I can't image it could be because it was formatted for Windows 7?

MiniTool Partition Wizard Free can be helpful in diagnostics:

Whatever the reason, would you trust an old hard drive which Windows doesn't get on with?

If you want to try something else, download and install Linux Mint on a USB stick, and run that as a live version from a USB port of your computer (you can do this without installing it on the computer). Run "Disks" on Mint with the WD drive plugged into another USB port. Disks should be able to tell you if the drive is formatted, and if so, with what it is formatted. If the WD drive isn't formatted, Disks should be able to do it for you - if it is possible.

It is likely it does not even have a partition on it (a non formatted partition would usually show up)

Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative tools -> Create and format hard disk partitions.

(Or from a windows explorer window, right click on the entry for "This PC" and select "Manage", then click Disk Management under Storage)

That will then show all the physical drives that the system can see. You should be able to create a partition on the drive and then format it.

Seems unlikely - Win 7 would format typically FAT32 or NTFS - both useable on current versions of windows.

Thanks. 'Windows tools' I assume. It says to initialise. MBR or GPT? 'Disk 2' is not in the main list. Does this reassure me it is the one to be initialised.

I thought that too. Your other advice seems to be the answer.

Depends on how you want to use the drive. For general compatibility and ease of access on multiple machines, go for the older Master Boot Record style partition (MBR).

If you want to boot from the drive on a modern PC with a UEFI bios, then you would probably need to make it GUID Partition Table (GPT) for a modern system to actually recognise it.

The top list will only show actual volumes - i.e. formatted partitions that are (usually) associated with a drive letter (although windows does not actually require driver letters these days, it is common to use them for compatibility with older software).

Note that you can have multiple partitions on one physical drive - so you might have (say) 4 logical volumes mapped onto one physical disk shown in the lower pane.

If you right click on the physical disk in the lower pane, and select "Properties" it will give you extra info about the disk - typically including the manufacturer and model. That can give you the assurance that you are playing with the right drive. Note that drives on external USB interfaces might have their identity obscured by the USB interface adaptor.

So in short, if you want a big lump of space to tote files about, make the disk MBR, put one "primary" partition on it to fill all the available space, and then format it as FAT32.

If you to preserve information like file ownership, alternate date streams etc, then format it as NTFS.

Disk manager has the facility to format it. Pervious it may have been formatted to something windows doesn't recognised - perhaps ext3/4 as used by a lot of PVRs.

Using Disk Management:

1. Open Disk Management: Search for "Disk Management" in the Windows search bar and open the application.

1. Locate the Disk: Identify the disk you want to detect. It may appear as "Unknown" or "Not Initialized" if it's new or not formatted.

2. Initialize and Format: If the disk is new or uninitialized, right-click on it and select "Initialize Disk". Then, right-click and choose "New Simple Volume" to format the drive with a file system (like NTFS) and assign a drive letter.

Great, thanks. This was my assumption but I wanted to check in case I trashed the wrong drive. Why FAT32 though when the rest of the PC is NTFS?

Great, I think this will be tonight's entertainment.

It says the device is not ready.

It depends on your use case. If it is just being used on the one windows PC - then NTFS is fine.

If you want it to work across multiple platforms and be readable on a variety of systems in addition to windows PCs then FAT32 can be read and written by pretty much anything. Support for NTFS on other platforms is less universal.

This is an example video of the disassembly of one of those.

The companies also make hard drives, where instead of a SATA connector showing, the controller only shows a USB connector on the hard drive controller board. And then, those drives are permanently compromised by their fixed USB connection. The USB hardware needs "S.M.A.R.T Passthrough" as a feature, in order to read out the "drive health".

We don't need to pay attention to the video right now, except to be familiar with the internal parts. A USB to SATA converter, a SATA drive. In other cases, the drive is "native USB" and not as useful to us.

The drive was ready at one point, because the drive identity command will not run, unless the drive is spinning and the firmware has been loaded off the platter. The controller board bolted to the hard drive, has a small ROM that the CPU on the drive uses. This is the "bootstrap code". It does not contain an ATA/ATAPI command interpreter, rendering the drive rather "dumb". when the power comes on, the bootstrap loads, the drive works the heads off the landing ramp, and when the spindle is up to speed (Listen with your ear for "humming" indicating a motor is working), the heads load onto the platters. And maybe 2MB of additional code is loaded off the platter. This can include critical data structures, a "map" which maps spared out sectors (stored in the cache RAM), plus the ATA command set code.

(If you hold your ear to an enclosure, and you hear "deedle-dee deedle0-dee", the spindle is stuck. the spindle seizes when the lubricant in the motor is gone.)

At this point, if the computer (via USB or via SATA) asks the drive "who are you", it would answer WD10PURP or whatever. It would send a string which is the drive model number.

And basically at this point then, the work necessary to bring up the command interpreter, has "proven in" that the heads are intact, the platter spins, and so on.

Now, if the drive "goes to sleep", it has a different state. The controller firmware is still loaded. The power does not go off on the controller board. But the controller, if it wants, can spin down the drive. On occasion, a drive design, is unable to "wake" properly, and it may give a "drive not ready" status. Which means the drive technically works, but some sort of firmware bug prevents continued operation. (While Windows Device Manager shows some "Power Save" tick boxes for keyboard and mouse, presumably the drive does not show any of those.)

External drives use "aggressive sleep" to control the enclosure temperature. On some drives, this was set as low as five seconds, which is just "silly". The drive is allowed to load and unload the heads, at least 300,000 times. You can see that aggressive sleep, could eat into that lifetime count. The problem is, the OS occasionally "pokes" the drive to see if it is still present, and this ruins the utility of the drive-implemented sleep.

If you use the HDTune "bad block scan", that serves to read the platter surface.

HDTune runs as Administrator, because it is doing low level access to a storage device. You could cable up the drive, start HDTune, then flip the power switch on the enclosure, then keep checking the HDTune menu for the drive identifier. Click "Start" in the Error Scan menu item, and see how long (or if) the drive will run, for a "surface scan".

That's an example of a fairly simple activity. By reading continuously, if the drive even stays "ready" for a few seconds, you may be able to read it for an hour or two (it can't enter sleep state, if the user keeps reading). The drive enclosure (being fan-free of course), gets pretty warm when you do this. The purpose of doing a scan, is to get some idea whether the thing is full of bad blocks, has a few, or is "green all the way".

Removing the drive from the enclosure, does not remove the aggressive sleep behavior. Not necessarily. There may be a command for that, but it's been a while since I've needed to work at that level on a drive.

But seeing as your drive is reporting Not Ready, something is up with the power state. And the sleep behavior is not a response to temperature either. Even if the room was refrigerated, the hardware would continue to irritate you with that behavior. It used to be that only laptop drives went to sleep instantly.

The drive body is typically rated for around 60C max. The disk writing operations are temperature-compensated. The drive has always had a need to measure the temperature, as part of operations of the dense ones. Older drives with only megabytes of data, the flying height was 1000x what it is now. A temperature of

Paul