The Tale of the Monster Hard Drive

A week or so back, Doug gave me a 500 gig Western Digital hard drive. It was a PATA (IDE) drive. Since new computers don't *do* PATA anymore, he had no use for it. But since I still use a lot of systems that are old enough to use them, I could use it.

I had another drive I'd had for a while (same model in fact) and since I was running low on space on the NAS (Network Attached Storage) boxes, I decided to plug them into my main box to use for storing some files that weren't as important from other drives.

Things were copying well when all of a sudden an error message popped up about the drive no longer being available.

I went into Computer Management, and did a refresh on the drive list. the 500 gig drive didn't show up anymore. but a "new" drive did show up. It had a semi-random string of ccharacters as a drive label.

And it showed as having two partitions. One of 16 gig, and the other of 2048 gig. (figures from memory, the may be a bit off). I couldn't do anything to the partitions. Got error messages.

I stuck it in my "bench" system and got much the same results. Tried accessing it with a Linux drive partitioning CD. Same deal.

*something* went south. And I now have a drive that reports that it iis a 1.3 *petabyte* drive!


If only...