Hi

A bit of a puzzle. My system was working for a time (9 months) before a complete system wide crash. So reinstalling windows XP on a new Seagate 120gb drive (ST3120811AS) I thought I could use the original SATA drive (a Maxtor DiamondMax 9 (6Y120M0)) as drive "D". All that happens is XP blue screens and effectively halts, however if I disconnect the Maxtor, XP boots up fine.

To be honest I might have other problems with the system which I'll post on other forums, but I cannot figure what has gone wrong - or have I missed somthing?

OBTW - I am using non-raid.

Thanx

The Maxtor 9 and 10 series drives had known compatibility issues with the NF4 chipset that appeared rather randomly as complete drive shutdowns. I went through five of them on a Deluxe before the problem was well publicized. It sounds like you have one of the offending drives.

Maxtor published a list of the drive model numbers with the problem on their site about a year ago. Go there and check to see if your drive is in the list. If it is, contact Maxtor and they will send you a firmware update for the drive.

Thanks for the speedy response I've emailed Seagate and await a reply. As a side note could the Maxtor drive affect/damage the motherboard, RAM, BIOS the universe etc.?
Just a thought as I started out with 1gb of RAM of which a faulty 512mb may have started the whole ball of wax to unravel.

Keep you posted.

No, the drive problem will do no damage to the rest of your components. It will, however, render the drive useless.

Is it:-

1. "It's dead Jim" (chuck in bin aka recycle)

or

2. "No it would be pushing up the daisy's if it wasn't nailed to the perch" (use in non Nforce 4 motherboard, don't chuck in bin) - Hurrah!

3. Use to level that uneven table

4. All of the above

Put that drive on another motherboard that does not have an NF4 chipset, reformat, and it will be just fine.

Flash it with the revised firmware, and you can use it on a board with the NF4 chipset.

The drive is fine, but it's current firmware does NOT get along with the chipset on your motherboard.

Bizaaar!

According to Seagate all I have to do is boot it up with PowerMax and perform a low-level format then Windows XP should then be able to recognise/format and I'm back in business - odd?

I rather not as yet do a low-level format as I can try the drive in a non-Nforce4 motherboard, but I'm such a coward I don't know if it will be the same (XP crashes). Thinking back on things, when it all went pear-shaped I just deleted everything on the Maxtor drive and didn't reformat or tell the drive it was no longer the "boot" drive. Could that have a bearing on things?

As you can gather I'm not sure which way to go as yet - oh well

Did you check the Maxtor site for the model numbers on the Diamond Max 9? If it is one of the affected drives, it will continue to cause problems on an NF4 motherboard until you flash the firmware. It will meltdown anywhere from immediately to six months out without the firmware update.

The Seagate drive should be fine.

I had problems with my Western Digital 250Gb SATAII drives where after things running fine I got blue screen and when trying to reinstall XP no matter what I did Windows would not see the drives during setup or so I thought.

Apparently Windows is not good at formatting drives and makes a mess of boot sectors so after much reading around the solution was to use a boot disc and then use the manuafacturers app to do a low level format. After than when I got to setup no problem this time.

The point I'm trying to make is go for the HD manufacturers low level format rather than Windows on a drive that has already had Windows installed on it before. Write 1's to 0's is what its called on W.Digital rather than low level format. Dont know what its called using your HD manaufacturers software.

To Arlie:
Regretably Maxtor's site has been integrated into Seagate's so I cannot determine if my drive is one of the "faulty" ones or not.

It would seem my only options are:

1. low-level format the drive (as per Seagate's Tech support)
2. Try the drive in a non Nforce4 motherboard

To chris57:
(paragraph 2) - Ditto

It's probably not kosher for me to reproduce this here, but here is the thread posted in the knowledge base at Seagate/Maxtor (search under Maxtor drives and NF4 as the search term):

Firmware updates will be issued for those drives experiencing the no detection problem only, not for experimental troubleshooting. Due to the nature of a firmware code update, a drive can be potentially rendered inoperable so it is critical that data is backed up first.

The drives affected are those listed in the following table:
Model begins with:

Code (Firmware revision)

6B- or 7B-

BANC1980
BANC1B70
BANC1BM0
BANC1BY0
BANC1E00


6L- or 7L-

BANC1G00
BANC1G10
BANC1G20



6H- or 7H-

HA431BW0

6V- or 7V-

VA111610
VA101610
VA131610
VA141610

Example of a drive label:

Image

Arlie

Thanks for the update viz the firmware codes, mine is YAR511W0 which does not appear to be one of the affected drives.

As I said in the earlier posts it's windows XP that is not recognizing the drive and not the motherboard.

Don't ya just love XP?

One thing to try, if your drive is not among those listed, is Storage manager within XP. Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management. Scroll through the drives there and see if your unrecognized drive shows up. If so, you can right click it to initialize, format, and partition it.

If you can't see it there, format it with Maxblast and see if XP will recognize it at that point.

XP will not boot if I connect the Maxtor drive, so my only alternative is to low level format. Before I try that I downloaded a program from www.ntfs.com/boot-disk which promises it can read all drives so if the program can "See" my data then it would be worth it.

If not and the data is corrupt then its the low level format route.

Thanks for your patience

Regards

Agent J