Maxtor External HD - system hangs at 100% format

[kayaksurfer]

When I partition and format my external Maxtor HD (120GB) connected via 1394/firewire using XP disk manager, the format reaches 100% and then hangs my system. It does this regardless of partiton size.

I then have to reboot, then disk manager says the partition (NTFS) is healthy, but accessing it in explorer brings up a prompt to format it again. The formatting in explorer also hangs my system at 100% completion, identical to disk manager.

I tried using the USB interface and a small partition and it all worked 100%. Does this mean the firewire portion of the drive is faulty, or my PC? I've only used the firewire card for capturing video up until today. My PC only has USB 1.1 so I'd really like to use the firewire option. Device manager says my firewire is Texas Instruments OHCI compatible, default windows drivers 7/1/2001.

Maxtor 5000DV 120GB
WinXP Home, 768MB
Athlon 1800+
PCI firewire card.

 

[morkinva]

I'm assuming that even if you can format the drive via usb you still cannot access the drive via 1394.

Maxtor's knowledge base mentions irq sharing can be a problem accessing a firewire drive:

How to check whether the device is sharing IRQs:

Windows 2000/XP: To open System Information, click "Start", and then click "Run". In the "Open" Box, type msinfo32.exe and select "ok". Click the plus in front of "Hardware Resources" then click on the IRQ folder to view possible IRQ sharing. There is also a Conflict/Sharing folder that lists all shared IRQs and the devices using them.

How to troubleshoot 1394 lockups in Windows:

Reserve the IRQ for the 1394 card.
If possible reserve the IRQ for the 1394 card in the system BIOS (not all BIOS' have that option). This option can usually be found in the Plug and Play section of your BIOS.

Disable ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) in the BIOS.
This can be found in the power menu of the BIOS.

NOTE: If you are using Windows 2000/XP you will have to reinstall Windows before this change can take effect. However you also have the option to disable ACPI in Windows 2000/XP. Go to system properties - hardware - device manager, click the plus in front of Computer and double click ACPI Uniprocessor PC. Select driver - update driver - click next when wizard opens and then select to display list. Then select to show all hardware and select Standard PC.

 

[kayaksurfer]

My 1394 card and the Soyo MB's built-in Promise Ultra IDE controller are sharing IRQ 10.

I'm unable to manually change the IRQ settings. I've switched to 'Standard PC' and I've gone into the properties and completely disabled IRQ steering, yet the options to change the IRQ's and IO are still greyed-out. If this means I still would have to reinstall windows then I don't see the point of doing the ACPI changes I just did... Maybe I could do a repair-install, or are we talking a clean install?

My BIOS has the option to manually change IRQ's from "PCI device" to "Reserved", but that seems to just prevent IRQ from being used at all by winXP (I end up with the 1394, IDE and USB all sharing IRQ 5 !)

If I could just manully change them in Device Damager I'd assign one of them to IRQ 6 (Floppy controller) because I'm not using a floppy drive.