Symantec recovery disk does not recognise new Western Digital hard drive

I was replacing the 160Gb hard drive in my Dell Dimension 5150C with a new Western Digital Caviar Blue 500Gb drive. I took the appropriate NG 15.0 backup and swapped over the drives.

When I tried to boot the Symantec Recovery Drive I got error message 0xc0000013 Parameter 0x762492A0 - and could n ot progress. It seemed to imply there was no recognisable hard drive.

 

I swapped the drives back, and the Symantec recovery started OK.

 

Searchig on-line did not give me any real help, just a few clues. I tried the WD support, but their guidance was of little help.

 

So - I figured the problem may be because the new drive was not formatted, but needed to be, although I had no way of formatting it.

The approach I took was to boot the Windows 7 installation disk and see if it recognised the new drive, and let it install Windows 7 and thus format the drve. This took only about 30 mins as it was a straightforward clean install.

Once it was done, I rebooted the Symantec Recovery disk, which now worked OK, and was able to then restore my original Windows 7  image to the new drive (over the new Windows 7 installation).

 

Thought I'd add this comment in case anyone else has the same issue.

 

Ok I fixed the problem, but why does the Syamantec Recovery disk not recognise the new out-of-the-box WD drive, when the Windows 7 install CD does?