maxtor acoustic management

[jwwrs]

I guess I'm just retarded on this one.
How do I get to a C:> prompt in W2K to install acoustic management.
Running 80G off of Maxtor ATA133 pci card.

TIA

 

[johnjkr1]

Win2k does not have a C: prompt. You will have to make a boot disk, boot to that, then run the amset utility.

 

[jwwrs]

Thanks John.

But been there, done that.

When all 4 disks are finished, the only 2 options presented are INSERT WIN2K CD or EXIT SETUP.

Am I missing something?

 

[gsaldivar]

Try making a Windows 98 or Dr. DOS bootdisk for this purpose. (www.bootdisk.com can help)

 

[johnjkr1]

your talking about the win2k setup discs, those will not help you. Just format a disk in my comptuer to be an msdos boot disk, then put amset on the disk, then reboot...that should take care of it.

 

[jwwrs]

OK guys,

Tried the w98 boot disk, also ms-dos BD(6.22).

Both give me a "NTDLR is missing, press ENTER to restart" message.

Help, help, me Rhonda!!!!

hdd's are NTFS, if that helps.

 

[johnjkr1]

If you get that error message, it means it is not finding anything to boot off of. Did you make the disk properly? Is your floppy drive enabled and set to be the first boot device?

 

[jwwrs]

John,

Yes, to both questions.

Maybe this is the problem.
The hdd is set up on a Maxtor ATA133 pci card.
After the floppy does it's thing, the system goes through an auto detect for the hdd on the pci card.
I have the bios set for A-CDROM-C as the bootup drives.

 

[InlineFive]

Actually MaxBlast is the wrong utility and can screw up your computer. From the sound of it you might have erased your boot sector. If that's the case then you should try doing a system restore (by pressing F8 upon boot to access Safe Mode). If that doesn't work it sounds like a repair install might be called for.
As for the acoustic management you should use Maxtor's AMSET utility to change the acoustic settings. In your case I think you will need to install it on a seperate disk from the WinXP Boot Disk. This is because it needs the chipset.xxx file to read the controller card and that file will cause the regular boot disk to not work correctly.

Good luck!

-Por

 

[jwwrs]

Thanks all,

Here's the workaround.

First, the reason I went to the controller is that my bios/MB doen't support drives over 40G. I've got an older Gigabyte board with the latest award bios flashed on it.

To get AMSET to work, I got a copy of Caldera DR-DOS and it booted right to an A:> prompt.
AMSET was telling me it did not detect any Maxtor hdd's.

I connected the 80G hdd to the primary ide connector on the MB and set the jumpers on the hdd to Master.
I also put the cylinder limitation jumper on.

This evidently let the MB/Bios "see" the drive.

Booted from the DR-DOS floppy to an A prompt, put the Amset disk in and it set up correctly.

After moving everything back to where I wanted it, booted up and there is a definite improvement in hdd performance(I turned acoustic management OFF).

There really isn't a noticable change in the sound level(on my setup, anyway).

Thanks for taking the time to help. Just hope this will help someone in the future.