old maxtor harddrive & enclosure

[jorwex]

i got hold of a dead maxtor drive from someone and played around with it and after formatting it, its working again.

so i was feeling lucky while it was still open, and tried putting a western digital drive that i had laying around in it. with the same jumper settings, windows didnt recognize it (and i know the western digital one works internally).

so i was wondering if theres anything i can do to make this external shell universal. anything common to all enclosures or something particular to the firmware in this Maxtor 5000DV shell?

thanks

 

[VirtualLarry]

How big was the HD that you tried to put into the enclosure? From what I understand, Maxtor implemented their own pre-standard support for 48-bit LBA for the larger drives, and that those older Maxtor-branded enclosures therefore will only work with larger Maxtor HDs, and not other brands. As for HDs smaller than 120GB, I don't know, I would tend to assume that they should work, but if that's what you've tried, and the drive doesn't require 48-bit LBA addressing, then I don't know. Perhaps the enclosure's firmware specifically checks for a drive ID string containing Maxtor?

 

[jorwex]

the wd drive is 80 gigs, but i realized that it was brand new, and that i hadnt formatted it yet. do drives come preformatted? ive never noticed... but regardless, shouldnt it have at least recognized? i even checked disk management in computer management in administrative tools.

thanks

 

[Nohr]

Hard drives do not come formatted because the manufacturer wouldn't know if you wanted FAT32, NTFS, Linux, etc.

 

[jackschmittusa]

When you say "the same jumper settings", you don't mean jumpers in the same position do you? They are different on different brands.

 

[jorwex]

hehe, nohr, good point. ill format it tomrorow and try it, but shouldnt it at least be recognized in disk management?

and yea its using its respective jumper settings. thanks

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm. I'm not sure what jumper config that enclosure would require, but like jack pointed out, perhaps try all three - "cable select", "master", and for WD drives, "single".

When you plug the enclosure with the drive mounted in it into the PC, what happens? Does Windows' install a driver? Is there anything listed under Device Manager, if you view by connection? IOW, is the USB external enclosure being seen at all? That should be the first step in troubleshooting it I think.

You also mentioned that the drive that you got was "dead" - could it be,that the enclosure is what died, and not the drive inside?

 

[jorwex]

well it works 100% with the harddrive it came with. its just i cant get it to work with teh wd drive. nothing is recognized at all with the western digital drive in the enclosure. its as if nothing happened at all when i use it with the enclosure. but as soon as i change drives to teh 160 maxtor, its fine.

it might not be possible, im just curious if theres a way to make it work with all drives (for convenience).


thanks!