twinchamber: nope, it cannot be started at all. its failing sooo bad. it sounds like the old Playstation 1s when they couldn't read a game. just keeps a strange ticking noise
twinchamber, this sounds like a dead drive to me. I have had experience of a few dead drives over the years and many of them made similar noises. I'm not sure exactly what it is, maybe heads on the platters(?) but I would guess it is terminal...
xarqui: Your big hurdle really is being able to prove that you didn't screw up and the flaw lies with the product. If you still have it, maybe you could try with another FAT32 formatted drive, although independent confirmation would be better. Even if it is shown to be a problem with the 900HD...
Indeed, and I have been doing some tests on my own 900HD and failed to replicate any disk problems. My last tests involved writing as many media (mp3) files to the FAT32 root directory and a subdirectory as I could (just under 22,000 in each) and attaching the drive to the 900HD. It wouldn't auto mount the drive so I had to force it to mount. I was unable to get it to recognise any of the mp3 files and the box behaved a bit strangely until I forcibly unmounted the drive, but no file system corruption occurred. The drive was still quite readable on my computer. I suspect the strange behaviour was because timeshifting is set on and the system could not write to the drive because the directories were full...
Anyway, I think you are flogging a dead horse trying to blame the 900HD, and to me it sounds more and more like disk failure. I am sorry I can't test it for you as I am in Dunedin. If you want to truly eliminate the possibility that the drive has been formatted with a linux file system, download or otherwise obtain a copy of ubuntu (I recommend 10.04 or 10.10) on CD or DVD, the live boot version, put it in your PC/laptop, boot it, attach the drive and see if it mounted... If you see nothing, open a terminal window and type 'dmesg' and examine the end of the output for something like this;
[66212.312028] usb 1-8: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
[66212.445868] usb 1-8: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=1100
[66212.445871] usb 1-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[66212.445875] usb 1-8: Product: My Book
[66212.445877] usb 1-8: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[66212.445879] usb 1-8: SerialNumber: 57442D574341535530343533303838
[66212.446014] usb 1-8: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[66212.643066] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[66212.643264] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[66212.643386] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[66212.643389] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[66212.644073] usb-storage: device found at 5
[66212.644075] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[66217.640216] usb-storage: device scan complete
[66217.641897] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD 5000AAV External 1.65 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[66217.642622] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[66217.643450] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB)
[66217.646121] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[66217.646127] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 21 00 00 00
[66217.646131] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[66217.648772] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[66217.648779] sdd: sdd1
[66217.674782] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[66217.674789] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
[66218.548891] EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
Brendan
