Hi there,
I hope someone out there can help me with the installation problem I am having with a Western Digital internal drive. In brief, I bought a new WD 500GB PATA drive to replace my current Seagate 160GB PATA.
I configured the WD using Easuse Partition Manger into 3 partitions and formatted the drive to FAT32. I then cloned my Seagate to WD using HDClone. I have used this freebie prog before without any problems.
On rebooting with the new WD500GB drive there were no problems. It all seemed to go well. Windows XP was working fine and no error messages were detected. All peripheral equipment – keyboard, mouse, printer etc seemed to work fine.
So I could increase my backup drive from the old Seagate 80GB I then decided to connect a WD120GB drive as a slave . I formatted the WD120GB to NTFS and copied all files from the old drive. No problems encountered. I was able to access, read and write to the drive. No error messages.
Then , I rebooted the system. On startup, all seemed ok, until Windows got going and found the newly installed WD120GB drive.
An error message came up –
Strange, I thought!!! Then in the bottom corner I saw the usb hub controller icon appear, followed by an error message from the Found New Hardware Wizard
This was weird.
I then checked Device Manager and saw that the WD120GB drive had the yellow exclamation mark on it. Unknown?? Looking into the properties of the device I saw HDD had an code 28 error.
Not sure what that is but Device Manager showed that the driver for the HDD was not installed. How can this be??
However, while it seems to be a system error of some description, I am able to see the drive in Explorer and can access the drive to read and write data.
This problem keeps recurring no matter whether I try to use the WD500GB or WD120GB either as slave or master on the secondary channel ribbon. In the image you can see that I even tried to use the drives as an external USB, to no avail
As this is a new WD drive there is a 30 day support from Western Digital. I have spoken to WD and their techs have no idea either.
My problem is that the WD drives show an error when connected as slave on either Primary or Secondary channels, or even when configured as USB external drives. Doesn’t seem to be a problem for the drive to be Master on Channel 0 ribbon but not on Channel 1. Go figure!!!
I have tried all different combinations of drive setup but all result in same error msgs.
What have I done to resolve my problem –
Have deleted ‘INFCACHE.1″ from Windows INF directory to try and reset drivers in the Windows registry but no luck.
Have downloaded and installed latest bios update for motherboard.
Have checked BIOS for drive settings and made sure set to IDE.
Have set BIOS to ‘AUTO’ for drive size type.
Have installed all latest Windows updates.
What I have not done …. yet…
Restored system to an earlier time – last week
Not done a repair Windows install
Technical details: My machine has:
Windows XP Pro, Version 2002, SP3 v5938
Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz cpu,
Gigabyte GA-8VM800PMD-775 motherboard,
1.5GB DDR ram,
MSI NX6200SX, 512mb, GeForce AGP 8x video card
Currently have the following HDD installed pending overcoming the WD problems
Primary HDD – Seagate 160Gb GDD
Slave HDD – Seagate 80Gb
I am hoping someone might give me an idea as to what could be the problem.
Many thanks in advance for any help.
PS. I have attached images of the error msgs which might assist.
