Trying to scan new HD for errors

The message at the top of the box says "monitors [the selected] drive [and] performance and predicts imminent failure." It'll say that always on the box. It's a standard label telling you what the point of that dialog is as opposed to a bunch of ticks and random numbers.
Anyway if its a brand new drive it'll be under warranty so if it does die, send it back.

wow--what a noob mistake! Yeah, I should have figured all those Green checks meant things were at least relatively ok. Thanks for pointing this out to me. I'll try to check the disk for errors again tonight and see if it finishes. I'll post those results when I have them.

Well despite the basic Smart disc info and checklist that indicates the drive is indeed working fine, I still can't get the WD diagnostics to do a complete scan for errors--not unless I have roughly 60 hrs to spare where I know I won't be using the computer. (The smaller drive (80 Gig) would accordingly take 8 hrs if I let it continue.) Is anyone aware of some software that does this HD error checking a bit more time efficiently?

(Again, the Windows disk error check also seems to not want to do it--at least not in a timely fashion...though I did attempt to run the window disk error check without either of the two suboptions of 1. Automatically fix file sys. errors and 2. Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. But without either of the options checked it seemed to run the utility far too quickly, in seconds, so I don't think it did anything.)

Edit: Could something about the 40 gig Norton Ghost image file be causing the lengthy scan time with the WD diagnostic.? If I delete that back up image file (the only thing on the drive right now) may it scan the drive for errors faster?

Edited by moscatomg1, 07 March 2009 - 11:01 AM.

Edit: honestly, I'm not trying to bump this--I just keep reading and discovering things about the WD5000AAKB drive. First in avsforum.com there's this post (http://www.avsforum....d.php?t=1072920) discussing that "WD drives with the suffix "AA" do not work" (though perhaps that was more addressing some particular A/V software mentioned therein) and then a critical comment in a newegg customer review about the Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL). Also I read that quickformat with windows for a new hd is not at all recommended, which for the life of me I can't remember back 5 days ago if that was the option I choose...I'm suspecting possibly, since it seemed to format such a large hd pretty quickly (minutes). Then when I try to play for example a video file from this new hd the sound is "crunchy," but if I move that file back to my old hd and play it the sound is fine. So I'm ignorant about what may cause this--such as are other "drivers" needed for video and media related playback? Then I read that in addition to the WD diag. that WD has hd formatting tool ("data lifeguard tools") for free download. I wonder if there's danger in just deleting my backup files from the disk and trying to (re)format the hd with this tool to see if there's better performance (for a/v file playback, scanning disk for error utility, etc.) I guess this is all a lot of noob wariness, but thanks for any advice.