I purchased and installed a WD hard drive a couple weeks ago, and ever since, I've been getting the "SMART Failure Predicted on Primary Slave" message on each startup. Also, each time I restart, I receive a "Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter" message. From this point I must shut down and reboot. The drive appears to work, and I'm able to store data on it, but I constantly get the above errors. I ran Norton's Disk Doctor, but it always froze while it reallocated bad sectors. I realize something is wrong, but I'm not sure what. Has anyone experienced this type of problem before? Suggestions? Is it possible that my hard drive is simply bad right out of the package? Or could there be another problem such as bad connections, software installation problem, etc? I'm not too familiar with BIOS, etc, so any tips catered to a novice would be greatly appreciated. For the record, I'm running a 900mhz P3 with Windows ME. Thanks.

Either return the hard drive to the point of purchase or call WD and have it replaced. Back up ASAP before disaster strikes...because it WILL strike. That drive is about to fail.

hey i have the same problem... but ive had my drive for a few years now.. but ya.. drives gonna fail... because ive been steadily noticing increasing errors in applications and alwasy memoory allocation erros, which would coincide with memory look ups in bad sectors. so return yours cuz its just crap. latez

Thanks for the help, guys. It's a good thing I haven't had the chance to fill the new HD yet. I'm transferring the data back to the original as we speak. So, to be clear, you don't think it's an installation problem? Like I wouldn't get these errors if, say, I had the connections backwards or something? For some reason it's just hard for me to believe that the drive would just crap out right out of the box, brand new. I'm just lucky I'm under full warranty.

If you download data lifegaurd from western digital & get yourself another drive at least you can trasfer all your data to the new drive, I agree with the other posts it sounds like a duff drive and you should get a replacement if its still under waranty.

The bios settings should be First hard drive (o/system Primary master the second slave drive primary slave & jumpers should be set on drives to corespond. The hard drive cable should be connected to IDE slot 1 (nearest to cpu usually) Cd rom secondary master or in the case of two roms one to master one to slave (both secondary) with jumpers set corespond and cable to IDE slot 2 making sure that the cable orientation is crrect.

"Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter" i have this same error message before, and got it resolved. it might not be your case but no harm trying. open up the case, there are four wires on the hd power connector. push them with a little force to ensure all wires are connected to the hd. it could be one of the wires is loose that cause the hd not to spin/starup and therefore bios couldn't detect it and produce that error message. next, run wd datalifeguard tool to get confirmation of physical failure before returning the drive.