Maxtor 200gb sata install problem

colin300

I got a Maxtor Diamond Max 10 200gb sata drive from Komplett and I have been having I would say the most serious of problems with it.

I have been trying to install it just another separate drive in a simple setup and I have been getting nothing but errors at the moment.

I will go through what i have done and tryed. I installed it in sata 2 postion as sata 1 is taken by my main hdd. It said when i loaded it up that it had installed the drive so i rebooted. Then i went to disk managment and i tried to format it. It got to the high 90% and then said the format could not complete and you have to bear in mind I had nothing running as i took other advice and turned off everything and it was done in safe mode. So then i saw even though it had not completed as it said it had formatted it as it said heathly. So then i went to format it to ntfs and then i got a drive not accessible error so i shutdown and restart in normal and the drive was there and so i thought it had worked and went to convert it to ntfs and got nothing but errors.

I then used partition magic to format it and still nothing and then i tried maxtors software and it would load sometimes and other times it would say bios is turned off on the drive.

It is killing me now. I have nearly got it to work a few times having it on fat 32 and the computer starts i have tried compying things to it but i get windows saying something about the file being queued and not able to write it.

So then i began to think maybe it because the drive is SATA2 and i have a SATA1 board but i said not because sata 2 is backward compatible i was lead to believe?

vishal

do you by any chance have an nforce 3/4 board. diamondmax 10 are known to have problems with them just as you are describing. search with google about, you may be able to find firmware for it that will make it work.
also try changing sata cables and changeing to sata 4. some boards have an non-nforce sata controller on them on the sata 5 and 6.

edit:
it is probably not the best idea to flash it on the nforce board because you could easily get a corrupt flash.
try it with an intel board if you have one or else bring it to maxtors walkin facility in bray.

8T8

What sort of motherboard/chipset have you got ?

Also have you tried replacing the SATA cable which you are using to connect the Maxtor drive ?

Now this is dependent on the type of SATA controller & driver you have but go into the Maxtor HD or SATA controller properties in the device manager and disable NCQ support if you can.

Edit:vishal beat me to it : )

colin300

Ok sorry for not getting back to you's i was out last night.

Here is all the info Abit NF7-S2G. As you can see its a nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset with MCP-RAID.

I will have a go at the NCQ thing in a min and get back you.

I saw you said about the maxtor walkin in bray where is that i haven't seen it even though i know things like that aren't advertised?

colin300

Not sure about where i would get that NCQ thing 8T8 was saying if you tell me a specific place i went through scsi raid controller and ide ata/atapi controllers and didn't see it

8T8

Right well its not the NCQ problem as the SATA controller on the nForce 2 does not support NCQ so it can't be that.

What you should do is update the bios of the moherboard to the latest version as the latest ROM of the NV SATA controller is bundled into the bios update this may reslove the compatibility issue.

Now if that doesnt fix it then do you have the NVIDIA SATA controller drivers installed ? If no then install them, if yes then uninstall them.

How to tell if you have them installed well you should have in the device manager either a "Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller" or a "nForce PATA/SATA Controller" entry if its the PCI IDE one then the NVIDIA IDE drivers are not installed.

To uninstall them if they are installed right click on the driver and go into its properties and click on "roll back driver" and you should be presented with the option of the "dual channel PCI IDE controller" after a reboot you should be free of the NV IDE drivers.

NVIDIA 5.10 chipset drivers If you dont have the NV drivers installed just tick the box or when it asks say yes to the NV IDE SW driver and see how it goes after a reboot.

[BTW make sure RAID mode is not enabled in the bios for the NVIDIA SATA controller if you're not using a RAID array]

vishal

i am not sure where in bray it is, i just read it somewhere on boards.

astrofool

AFAIK, the nForce2 never had SATA, the sata ports are powered by a Promise controler iirc.

8T8

The nForce 2 chipset got a refresh called the nForce 2 400 which included a native SATA controller but minus the soundstorm audio it was basically the southbridge from the nForce 3.

colin300

just to let you know before i do anything with the computer now i did update the bios about 3 weeks ago.

colin300

right the sata drive and pata driver was installed so i rolledback hooked everything up and we have the drive visible as i did before but the computer is hanging and will probably give me a error in a min so i will wait for it and then installed the latest drivers.

colin300

Ok i think i might have found the problem.

one of the sata cables i have has a bit of the plastic on the connector chipped off and just to make sure my suspisions were right i put this cable as it was on the main hdd and it didn't boot the odd thing is thought it picked it up in the bios but didn't load. So maybe this might be the cause????

vishal

i did say try changing cables

colin300

I did but i didn't notice one of them had a chip but would u say that it could be causing the problem?

colin300

I just ran powermax the program from maxtor and it gave the great news that something is wrong with the hard drive it tryed it normal diagnostics and they came back bad.

vishal do u have any idea what happened in thread you said about?

8T8

Well if maxtors own tools are saying the drive is dodgy I'd take that as a sign it's time to RMA the drive.

One thing you could do just to be sure is if you plug the drive into a friends PC and see if Maxtors tools say the same thing just to rule out your PC as a source of any problems so you can send it back to Maxtor certain that is the cause of the problems.

colin300

thats the thing i dont know anyone with sata they are still all on ide.

drive3331

I recently bought a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA2 drive.
I had the exact same problem with the drive getting it to format.
Anyway i was about to RMA it when i took it out and had a closer look.
The drive shipped with SATA2 enabled but there is a jumper on the back to enable the slower SATA transfer. Swaped the jumper and was able to format the drive.

Have a look and let us know if it is the same on your drive.

colin300

Giving it a go at the moment lets hope. From what i could see it was sata2 so i changed it.

colin300

Sweet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god i could kiss you!!!! U wonder how no one on any other forum i have searched has said that.











not gay just so happy

drive3331

Wooot...hehe...feel the love...lol....

happy to have helped!

colin300

just out of curiosity how did u realise that because i was there when i got it and i noticed it was on the drive what 1.5gb/s was but i would expect companies since sata2 is new that they would still ship them with the slower speed as default?


just running a low level format now any idea how long that will take?

drive3331

I took the drive out and was about to bag it to send back when i checked the jumper settings.
Should have been the first thing i did before trying to install the drive :rolleyes:

colin300

sure hopefully they might put something on their site saying that little piece of vital information. Its always the simplest things that get people.

8T8

Weird.... one for the books I guess as I have 4 Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300GB SATA HDs and they dont have this SATA1/2 switch on them.

Never even seen this kind of problem till now still interesting though.

colin300

Ye definately something people need to be enlightened about because even though its so simple you would think it would be alot harder since myself personally would never think about the sata jumpers. I would think of the most difficult thing to fix and try and see if that works.

I think i will say it to McKomplett so not too many others fall into this trap.