Chaintech VNF4 compatibility issue with Maxtor DiamondMax 10

boggled

Junior Member
Mar 31, 2005
6
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> Chaintech VNF4 nForce 4 Athlon 64(FX)/Sempron Skt939 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Gigabit LAN, RAID/Serial ATA
>Bios Ver 2.0 Date 2005/02/03
>Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Processor Socket 939
>Logisys PS500MSGN 500W Meshed Green LED ATX/BTX Power
>Mem: 512 K DDR400
>Display adapters: Abit RX600 Pro-PCIE Radeon X600 Pro PCI Express 256MB DDR Video Card
>Win XP Pro w/ SP2
>LiteOn 52X24X52X CD RW
>D-Link AirPlus DWL-G520 Wireless PCI Adapter
>Lucent Win Modem


The system works fine with and boots from either of the following HD:
I did a fresh install on the IBM and cloned over to the WD. The system will recognize and boot from either drive.
IBM Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 120GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
Western Digital WD800BB 80 Gig PATA HD



The system does not work with:
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B250S0 250GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
MDL# 6B250S0A6530B
Mfg.Date 15AUG2004

The system most of the time will not even display the drive as present during system boot up. The OS can not be installed because the drive is not detected. If I connect the drive during the boot process, the system will pause to try and identify the drive. The system seems to detect something but it can?t be identified most of the time. On the occasions that the system detects the drive it still can not access the drive.

Oddly, if the SATA IBM or the PATA WD hard drives are set up as the boot drives and I connect the Maxtor to the computer, the system still will not boot from either the SATA or even the PATA drive. The following happens:

After system self test (most of the time the Maxtor was not even detected), the system attempts to boot from the IBM or WD HD and hangs in one of two ways.
1. Screen goes blank and system locks after attempting to load WIN XP Pro.
2. Screen shows WIN XP?s first startup screen and hangs, but strangely the display is very dim as if the brightness was turned way down.

I thought it may be a bad drive so I purchased a second identical drive with the intent of returning the first one if it was bad. However the second drive behaved the same way.

I have tested the drives on a different PC and it appears to work fine.

There seem to be a compatibility issue with the Maxtor DiamondMax 10s and the Chaintech VNF4 nForce MB.

I have spent many hours trying to resolve the issue. Could anyone be of assistance?

Paul

 

joule

Junior Member
Mar 29, 2005
5
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email/call maxtor and they will provide you with a new firmware which AFAICT solves the problem. I had this exact same problem with a gigabyte ga-k8nf-9. Same manufacture date (or really close, it is in the case now and I don't feel like looking). I think newer diamondmax 10's are shipping with the new firmware so not everyone is having problems with NF4 boards. Just us lucky enough to get older ones.

Maxtor responded to my email in less than 24 hours telling me to call, I called and in less than 5 minutes was on with a "senior" tech who emailed me the firmware after figuring out which one would work with my drive. You'll want to have your drive in your hand when you call. And you'll obviously need another machine that can see the drive to update the firmware.

Hopefully you'll be as lucky :)
 

joule

Junior Member
Mar 29, 2005
5
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Or, maybe not...

With the new firmware installed, the drive seemd to work fine. Installed the OS, drivers, programs... Everything seemed fine. Gigabyte had sent me a beta BIOS and I thought I would apply that. I did and everything seemed fine. Next day I powered up the machine and it locked while booting. After resetting the board did not recognize the drive. Same problem. After a few attempts I got it to boot but then things started getting weird. The virus software and apache wouldn't start and other weird behaviors. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling apache and the machine froze. I reflashed the BIOS back to the stock non-beta but that didn't help. Blah blah blah.

I gave up and installed a Maxline Plus II I had on hand.

Point is that there may be a whack of these drives that are never going to work reliably with the NF4.

-j
 

Silversierra

Senior member
Jan 25, 2005
664
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I know sata drives don't have master/slave jumpers, but I read a thread somewhere that a guy had a maxtor diamondmax 10 sata and a abit fata1ity board with similar problems, and the guy fixed it by putting a cap on the jumper on the back of the drive. I don't know what this means though, sata doesn't have jumpers, or does this particular drive have some kind of jumper? I also don't know what the guy meant buy "cap". Maybe this will help?