Do Maxtor drives suck, or is something else going on?

[waharris007]

I just installed a new 120 gig hdd as a slave on my system. When I started up the computer, I expected XP to detect the drive and let me know its there. But, I got no message, and the drive didn't show up in My Computer. I used Partition Magic 8.0 and saw the drive as unallocated, unpartitioned disk space. So, I tried to format it and set it up from there. But, Partition Magic locks up every time I try to make changes to this drive. I FINALLY got it formatted and set up as a partitioned drive through XP's disk manager, but it freezes every time I try to write to that disk. I tried to reformat through Partion Magic, but it keeps locking up. I right clicked on the drive and chose "format," but that could not complete successfully. Right now, I'm waiting on it to format again through disk manager. And, when it does lock up and I have to do a hard reboot, startup does not detect either hard drive and I get a disk error. I have to kill the power, count to five, then power up again. What's the deal???

I'm running XP home on an Athlon 2000 ASUS mobo.

Help!

 

[amdskip]

Sounds like you don't have something physically correct. You sure the jumpers are all set up correctly, try a different cable too for kicks.

 

[olds]

Did you try Maxtor's utility that came with the HDD?
Maxtor's always seem more finicky to install to me. Replace the cable if you have another and double check connections to be sure they are fully seated just to eliminate any problems there.

 

[Bleep]

This happens sometimes when the HD is set to cable select. And I second the motion that you try MaxBlast.

Bleep

 

[videobruce]

Is this the only HDD in your system? If it is use Fdisk and see if it shows there. Partition it there and format it from a floppy that has format.com included.

I have had Maxtors for some time and haven't had a problem though I really wouldn't use Maxblast! PowerMax is another thing. That is a great error checking utility (separate download)!

 

[HdwGuy]

Are you the adminstrator? or user? Only admin can add hardware to XP. Under Control Panel Click on Administrative Tools, Then click on Computer Managment, In the left side of the window under Storage click on Disk Management. From here you should see all drives in your computer (formated or not) If your slave drive (i assume it is D: or E: depending weither you have a cdrom drive present) is not their then their is a hardward problem! If it is their then you can fromat the drive right their. No need to drop to dos to format under XP!!! Good luck

 

[tjaisv]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Sounds like you don't have something physically correct. You sure the jumpers are all set up correctly, try a different cable too for kicks.

Yeah it sounds like you need to double check your physical setup. Explain how your setup is right now. Ideally you should plug each HDD as master on its own IDE slot, like this:

IDE Primary: Master: HDD1
IDE Primary: Slave: CD-ROM
IDE Secondary: Master: HDD2
IDE Secondary: Slave: Any Device

And make sure your ribbon cables are plugged in correctly both on the drives and on the mobo IDE slots (red dotted stripe indicates pin 1).

The above posters have already suggested how to go about getting the drive running in XP.