philo wrote:
I recently replaced an older WD drive . All went well and there are no
problems..but I am trying to analyze what went wrong with the old drive.


The machine had been occasionally locking up and the WD quick test
failed with error code 0003


I could find no listing of that code on WD's site

I did find a 103 code that said "write fault error"



Interestingly, the drive passed the long test.
Possibly the long test just checked the disk's surface.

http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/gene...es.asp?print=y

0001 - 0008, 0015 SMART Error

Notice how really really specific that is :-)
It means some testing the drive did internally, may
account for the error. You can command the drive to run
a SMART test, via the IDE interface. Testing does not
have to be initiated solely with read/write ops from the
outside. The drive can actually do stuff on its own, then
pop back an error code.

HTH,
Paul