Primary Hard Disk Failure even after running Maxtor Powemax

[theonlytazman]

Help

We have a Maxtor hard drive using a single cable set as Master as the primary hard drive

Motherboard is an Asus A7V333, OS is WinXP HE

The BIOS sometimes detects the hard drive and sometimes doesn't. If it does or doesn't detect it we get the msg primary hard disk failure press F1 to continue

We have run Maxtor's Power Max software and found on the 1st test that it ALL passed apart from the test which said BIOS Extension Support which Failed

The Quick Test & Full Tests both PASSED with no problems

Yet we are still getting these problems. Any help would be much appreciated as we don't want to lose the data (we know you can use data recovery s/ware but we would prefer to sort out the problem quickly & cheaply!)

HELP!

 

[jdunderhill]

Only a suggestion but i've had a prob like it before

It would be interesting if your drive is set to "Auto" or whether you have manually entered cylinders and heads in the BIOS

If you haven't got drive overlay software and your motherboard can support large hard disks there is an option whereby you could manually add the details such as amount of cylinders and heads etc

We had to do it on one of our work PC's, it seemed that if set to "Auto" occasionally the PC would fail to recognise it, by manually adding the values it bided the PC more time to recognise it!

Sorry if my post is a bit confusing i'd be interested if anyone else has had something like this aswell?

Cheers

Jamie

 

[jdunderhill]

What I am really suggesting is to find out whether the drive is set to "Auto" under the BIOS

If it is then you could try adding the details in manually

- You will need to find out how many cylinders and heads it has which is sometimes printed on the Drive or can probably be found from Maxtor, then choose the save changes option then exit BIOS and see what happens!!

 

[Jontmke]

But, if it is a really big drive the bios cannot go that high. That is why Maxtor and others have those programs that somehow fool the bios into seeing them.
Maybe that is what that error is.
Is this a really big drive? If it is have you used the "maxblast" software disk to format it? It puts an "overlay" on the drive so older bios's can see them.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[theonlytazman]

Thanks guys

The maxtor is only an 80gb model, and as the Asus was 1 of the latest boards (with USB2, firewire, raid etc...) I feel that it should not be a BIOS issue

The BIOS setting is set at Auto, I will use Powermax to check the cylinder settings etc... (jdunderhill)

I will keep in touch & let you know how that goes

I would really like to know what the BIOS Extension Support failure actually means & why Powermax came up 100% ok apart from this

 

[theonlytazman]

Just changed the BIOS setting to user defined

Still NO luck. The pc comes up with the msg:

Primary Master drive fails - press f1 to continue

I have tried another couple of leads (no luck)

Also swapped the hard drive to the secondary slot - still no luck

Don't tell me that is it?

 

[bcastner]

Is this the new ATA133 series of 80 gig drives?

I had one that would not boot with SMART failures after two months. I ran the powermax utilities and it did report errors, but would do the 3rd test, the recertification test. One day later I had SMART failure errors again.

I RMA's the drive and that drive lasted one week.

I RMA's the drive and that drive has worked well for four months now.

This is a relatively new drive model (Diamond Max Plus) and I recommend you RMA the drive. The process was easy, I filled in the RMA form on-line at the Maxtor site. Run Powermax again, I would be surprised if there were no error codes thrown in testing at Step #2.

 

[theonlytazman]

It's a Maxtor Diamondmax D740X and yes its ata133

Unfortunately the h/d is over 1 yr old - so no warranty? Or are they 3 yrs?

I have completed all 3 of the 1st tests and the only failure was on test 1 with the BIOS Support Extension

The drive does whirr away so it seems functional - I wonder if I do a low level format whether that would make it work again (I know I will lose the data though!)

There must be some way of sorting this out without an RMA?

 

[bcastner]

Try disabling a BIOS option for SMART support on the drive.

 

[Sajjin]

Hi Tazman, go to this site and you can check to see if your drive is still under warranty.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/index.htm

 

[theonlytazman]

Just some quick notes on this:

We have ended up purchasing another h/d this time a 60GB Hitachi model

Re-installed WinXP and left the old h/d as a 2ndary slave. On boot-up we get the msg "primary disk fail on secondary slave press "f1"" not to worried about this as, as soon as we press F1 the other h/d kicks in and boots up into Windows XP

But the strange thing is that Windows can see the other h/d. Are new h/d is relabelled "f" drive and the knackered (or so we thought) is coming up as the "c" drive - strange?

Also we can copy all the files from this "c" drive onto the new Hitachi (or "f&quot drive

Is it that the pc is actually booting up from the old h/d and that is why it is labelled "c" or is it solely due to the fact that it was the primary drive before and has an active partition?

No clues on this but we were able to transfer ALL the important data (without having to use Easy Recovery or similar)

Does this mean that the h/d is ok? If we can see & copy files over - it seems like it is, but why the error msg's at the beginning?

Any ideas?