3rd HDD crashes system when accessed

[suggy]

Hi @ all

Running athlon 1700 with geforce 6800, 756 ram and 2 80gb hdd. Decided to upgrade to a 300gb drive for storage - bought it without realising the lba problems etc but worked around it. My setup is now

primary: 10gb partion drive 1
70 gb partition drive 1
80gb drive 2

this was working fine

but now that my maxtor 300gb drive is connected to my secondary slave its causing problems. Its detected fine in bios and windows, I have run every possible scan to detect physical errors etc - I can only assume its to do with the setup. As soon as I try and copy stuff onto the 3rd drive windows locks up. Its beginning to annoy me, any suggestions?

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried other configurations (like the 300GB drive on its own as secondary master, or as primary slave etc)?

Bios does see whole drive?

Windows (xp?) does see whole drive?

How did you partition/format the 300GB drive? (ie, using what tool, what partitions sizes, filestore type(s))

 

[suggy]

Yup it didn't seem to like it - I have tried as primary master and tried to put windows on it - the setup would not complete with NTLDR missing - I copied it over from the windows cd and then it said that hal.dll was missing. Gave up on that one after fixing its mbr and scanning using every freeware program for errors - tried running it as the primary slave - same problem in accessing the drive crashed the system.

The only difference between the drives (apart from the capacity) is that my maxtor is 7200rpm - can't believe this would make any difference?

One other thing which is in the back of my mind is a power issue - I only have a 350w - would this be enough for 3hdd?

The only configuration I have not tried is with the max at secondary master - I will give it a go this evening but I have a feeling its deeper than this.

 

[jurgen36]

If its a high quality power supply it should be ok. Use in one of my machines a very high qualty supply only 350 watts but very heavy has about the weight of 3 normal 350 watt supplies.
CPU P4 3.4 prescot
1 gig of ram
8 hard drives and two dvd burners.
No problems at all. But a normal 500 watt supply just will not boot up. So the exact rating does not seem to matter. Regards

Jurgen

 

[mainegeek]

suggy,
Sounds like your bios isn't able to see the full size of the drive. Also, what OS are you trying to run it with?

 

[wolluf]

if bios sees whole drive, have you run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility on it? (usually available on their website)

 

[ddmcp2000]

My suggestion? Stick a DIFFERENT stick of RAM in the box. I have seen this happen before, and I ended up corrupting HUNDREDS of my very valuable pre-Napster-shutdown MP3's - Also, my machine was doing exactly the same thing on install - different files, but the same thing...

BTW, DDO's (dynamic drive overlays) are a WASTE of system resources today - you still only have 640k to play with people!!!

However, 300G, huh? What OS are you installing? 2K, even SP4 will not look at anything that big, without a reg hack, so, installing on a partition that big is out of the question for *that* OS. Accessing it properly after installation is easy though... Here's some info on it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098

XP also cannot support drives over 137G, if you are using older install media that does NOT have SP1, SP1a, or SP2, slipstreamed into it. It will see only the first 137G of space, and if you try to format it as a single partition(which it will happily do), copying files to it WILL cause corruption and data loss... Here's the KB article on that issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

The issues seen when installing or copying to larger drives than 137G could be similar to what you have described for both 2K and XP.

I'd check the memory FIRST though! My money sez bad memory...