Author Topic: Need help with a hard drive format question (Read 327 times)

Reschke · « **on:** March 26, 2002, 04:32:56 PM »

I have a Maxtor 80GB ATA133 drive running on a Promise ATA133 card in my computer along with an IBM 22GXP 13.3GB ATA66 drive. I am running WinXP Professional also.

Now when I boot up it up the IBM which was the first drive in the system still reads as C: and the 80GB reads as D: and both show up in the post screen. Now I get errors as with the Check Disk utility in WinXP. When I get into WinXP and try to use the 80GB drive that is showing in the "my Computer" section it shows as an NTFS partition but it will not allow me to format the drive at all. If I try to format it under WinXP it tries forever to do it but then comes back saying that the drive is not connected. I have the drive on cable select and on the IDE1 channel on the ATA card. There is no information on the drive at all and it was working fine until last night. With the errors I am not sure if they are being caused from the IBM drive or the Maxtor drive.

If you guys can help out I would appreciate it.

System info:
T-Bird 1.4GHz
512MB DDR PC2100
ASUS A7V266
Abit Siluro GF4 Ti4400
MX300
3Com 905B 10/100
Maxtor/Promise ATA133 controller card
WinXP Pro
DX8.1
Latest Via 4-in-1 driver set

Puck · « **Reply #1 on:** March 26, 2002, 04:40:19 PM »

"Working fine until last night" is a bad sign.

Plug it into the secondary channel on your MB and set it as the master, then see if things improve. If you still can't tak to it I'd start looking to see if it's still under warranty.

Reschke · « **Reply #2 on:** March 26, 2002, 05:27:36 PM »

I have had the drive for less than two weeks so I know it is still under the warranty period. On plugging it into the board though; if the board does not support ATA133 but only ATA100 and you plug the drive into the slower port does it matter? I had read something about this a long time ago but I can not find any reference to this anywhere.

Puck · « **Reply #3 on:** March 26, 2002, 05:42:26 PM »

Sure hope not; we have servers with ATA100s plugged into ATA66 boards, 133s in 33 boards, etc.

Shouldn't be an issue; the controller on the drive ought to be able to match to the slower speed on the MB.

Reschke · « **Reply #4 on:** March 26, 2002, 08:31:37 PM »

Thanks for the info Puck I was not sure so I figured I would at least ask the question.

sparkzz · « **Reply #5 on:** March 27, 2002, 12:08:00 AM »

A low level format will problem fix your drive. Usually when I get the ntfs error message something in the boot sector decided to crash. You can get a low level format program from the Maxtor support page. CAUTION: Low level format takes a long time... but is still faster than having to send the drive back.

And as Puck said the drive will revert to the highest DMA speed the board will support. So no problems there.

Reschke · « **Reply #6 on:** March 27, 2002, 08:28:08 PM »

Thanks guys.