Maxtor Diamondmax 10 blue screen errors

Fobia

Hey,
I've looked around a lot and asked on #tech.ie.....though indeed I have gotten a few suggestions all of them are either tried already, involve formatting etc..

Basicly, bought a new HDD there at christmas - a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200gb IDE from Komplett. I upgraded to service pack 2 and used Maxtor's Big Drive Enabler from their site to get windows to recognise all 200gb of the drive. Next I used Partition Magic to create a 200gb fat32 partition on the drive, I rebooted....everything seemed hunky dory and I played bf 1942 and quake3 (both of which I had transferred to the disk without any problems) long into the night.

Next morning I boot up and start transferring about 100gigs of stuff onto the drive, to my surprise after about 60gb the pc crashes with a blue screen and the error "fastfat.sys", I hope it's a one off and decide to finish transferring the files and look into it. It gets to 80gigs then crashes again with the same error. I abandon the searching errors and get on the net to search for other people who've encountered this before but after reading through many threads I cannot find anyone who's had an identical problem.

Next I tried opening some other games. To my amazement every game other than quake3 and bf 1942 causes the pc to crash with that fastfat.sys error, and since then I've encountered the same error when trying to transfer files, and I get various blue screens of death (IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL and "page fault in non-paged area" while browsing/playing movies but still mainly the fastfat.sys one.....

To summarize, new 200gb drive on Dell dimension 4500 mobo crashes at random intervals and whenever I try to open almost any game.

Problems I've thought of;
Bios - checked Dell site and only one upgrade available which doesn't do anything concerning HDD's
IDE controller too old - I thought the HDD wouldn't function at all if this was the case?
Wrong cabling (my other hdd is ata-100 this'un is ata-133) - Same as above?

I'm open to any suggestions with regards to fixing it that don't involve formatting......if you're sure of the problem and it requires new hardware then I'm open to that too but I don't want to be buying something and find out that it still doesn't work

Thanks in advance,
Fobia.

NotMe

What's the big drive enabler? I recently bought that exact same harddrive and it works fine. I didn't have to install any software for it.

Fobia

It's a utility available from the maxtor site that lets windows see all 200gb of big HDDs...


I'm starting to think that it's a simple cable problem - only one way to find out.

NotMe

Windows can see all of my 200GB drive. Do I need this utility?

RicardoSmith

Ummm. Theres some people having issues on the US Dell talk forums, but you shouldn't really have a problem unless the service packs didn't install properly or the enabler didn't. Otherwise it should work fine. If you exhaust all options, you can buy a new IDE/SATA card and it should support it no problems. Or USB2 card and USB2 external caddy.

You might have a dodgey cable. Can you try another one?

SirLemonhead

I presume this is an IDE drive only problem?

Fobia

RicardoSmith wrote:

Ummm. Theres some people having issues on the US Dell talk forums, but you shouldn't really have a problem unless the service packs didn't install properly or the enabler didn't. Otherwise it should work fine. If you exhaust all options, you can buy a new IDE/SATA card and it should support it no problems. Or USB2 card and USB2 external caddy.

You might have a dodgey cable. Can you try another one?

I posted on the Dell forums alright but unfortunately it received no response....

Indeed the cable is the most likely atm so I'm going to try and get hold of some ata-133 cable as mine just came with the pc (it doesn't specify what type it is on the cable). If that doesn't fix it then it leaves me with three options; IDE controller, BIOS or software.....BIOS couldn't be fixed if that's the problem but an IDE controller would sort it out so the problem should be fixed with a new IDE controller, a new cable or else it's a software problem and then t'would get alot more complicated

Ah well, hopefully I'll get it fixed before galwaylan XII anyways...

Fobia.

Fobia

Well, it's working now, so I thought I'd post a followup thread on what I did to fix it.

I tried different cables but to no avail.

Next I thought I'd try linux, (not really) to my surprise I could move files in linux without crashing (linux crashing? HA!). So I figured it must simply be a windoze problem.

Tried a repair from the xp pro installation disk with no luck.

I decided I'd go for a big ntfs drive and just wait for perfect linux ntfs drivers .

Converted the partition to ntfs....that's it folks. 200gb's of fully functioning ntfs data.

End thoughts: windows doesn't like big fat32 partitions.

Moral of the story: use linux unless you absolutely have to go to the dark side.

Thanks for all the suggestions etc....

Fobia.

SirLemonhead

Why didn't you just use NTFS in the beginning?

RicardoSmith

MasterOfSolos wrote:

Why didn't you just use NTFS in the beginning?

I was wondering that myself. Unless you need 98 or another OS to access that drive?

Fobia

MasterOfSolos wrote:

Why didn't you just use NTFS in the beginning?

The linux NTFS drivers are still dodgy and as such it isn't safe to write to ntfs partitions with it...I only use windows for games and LANs you see