ITinfo: Western Digital Recalls Hard Drives

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Caviar Hard Drives Recalled

Western Digital quickly takes the high road

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Western Digital Recalls Hard Drives

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

It can't get much worse for Western Digital the leading hard drive manufacturer. The Irvine, California-based maker of hard disk drives announced this week that it will recall approximately 400,000 of its Caviar EIDE desktop hard drives, its flagship product, because of a faulty internal chip.

The chip, which affects the disk drive motor, causes problems to erupt in about six to twelve months; the drive may fail to power up.

"Western Digital is taking a conservative course by recalling the affected lot of this product," said Matt Massengill, Western's COO, in a prepared statement.

The faulty chip was incorporated into approximately 1 million drives manufactured between August 27 and September 24. Of that number, about 400,000 have been sold. Customers who believe that they may have a defective drive are being advised to visit Western Digital's site to start the process to obtain a replacement, if necessary.

According to Western Digital's website, a "hardware issue" was detected during extensive quality testing procedures that affects a very specific group of Western Digital Caviar 5400 RPM EIDE hard drives. This issue could cause the hard drives to fail to power-up after six to 12 months of full-time use. The affected drives were manufactured between August 27, 1999 and September 24, 1999 and range in capacity from 6.4GB to 20.5GB. None of Western Digital's WD Expert, WD Enterprise, and WD Performer hard drives are affected.

As part of Western Digital's ongoing commitment to quality, they are providing a drive utility that identifies the affected WD Caviar hard drives. Western Digital highly recommends that you test your drive using this utility.

Affected Western Digital Caviar model numbers are:

WD64AA
WD68AA
WD84AA
WD100AA
WD102AA
WD135AA
WD136AA
WD170AA
WD172AA
WD200AA
WD205AA

There is no need to test any model other than those listed above.

The drive testing procedure is:

Download the "dt.exe" utility.
Copy "dt.exe" file to a floppy disk or to your local hard drive.
From a DOS prompt, type "dt" to automatically decompress the utility.
Run the utility "DRVTEST.EXE" from a DOS prompt. We recommend that you first reboot your system with a bootable DOS diskette.
NOTE: Windows users must restart in MS-DOS mode or reboot with a bootable DOS diskette to run this utility. You cannot run this program from within a DOS session in a Windows environment.
Follow the instructions on your screen to complete the drive test.
Reboot your system after the test is complete.

If your drive is affected, contact Western Digital technical support at the following numbers:

USA: 1-800-357-1374
Monday-Friday 9 am - 6 pm Central Standard Time

Europe: 31 20 446-7651
Monday-Thursday 9:30 am - 12 noon, 1 pm - 5:30 Central European Time
Friday 9:30 am - 12 noon, 1 pm - 4:00 Central European Time

What do you think? Is Western Digital and their Caviar drives still your favorite brand of hard disk? Leave your comments on the message center.

Western Digital
Western Digital dt.exe testing program download
Message Center

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/1999/it990928.html
updated September 28, 1999