G
guest747
Hi,
Recently I had the experience of having some
bad system memory which led to corruption of
my hard disk which eventually led to not
being able to boot.
For whatever reason, when I first detected the
instability I thought it was the hard drive so
I shelved my Deskstar 120 and went to the store
to pick up an ultra ata 250GB Diamondmax 10
to replace it.
The first time I tried to set up the new
Diamondmax I used the CD software which came
with the drive: version 3.-something of the
Maxblast software.
I booted to the Maxtor CD and set up two ~130GB
NTFS partitions, which I used to install XP on.
Without too much trouble I was able to set up
the old Deskstar as a slave and copy over my
old data.
Things seemed to go fine over the new few days,
however my system eventually crashed again due
to the bad memory, a side effect of this was
that the new Diamondmax drive got corrupted.
A few days later I got my new memory and I
wanted to reinstall the new Diamondmax drive,
but first I wanted to recover data from it,
like I had done with the IBM Deskstar.
I set the new Diamondmax up as a slave but XP
couldn't "see" any data in the first partition.
XP recognized it as "unformatted" so I was unable
to recover anything from it. It could have been
that the damage done to the Diamondmax by the bad
memory was more extensive than the damage that had
been done in the case of the Deskstar, however I
had a sneaking suspicion that some of the
pre-installation voodoo that was required for the
Diamondmax had something to do with XP not being
able to make sense of first partition.
Now that my system memory was fine, I decided
to reinstall the 250GB Maxtor drive. I accessed
Maxtor's web site from another PC to get their
latest version of the Maxblast software, which
I think is version 4.
I booted from a Maxtor floppy disk (which you
make from the utility available at maxtor.com)
and went through the same process that I originally
went through to set up the Diamondmax 250. I made
two ~130GB NTFS partitions, then rebooted to the
windows CD to begin installation.
Now if you've been following this long story
here is where it gets disconcerting.
Everything went fine. XP booted up, installed
its files, then rebooted... I entered, username,
organization, time zone info, etc. Finally
installation was complete. I shut down, added
my old Deskstar as a slave, rebooted, came up
to XP and then proceeded to copy most my important
info from the old Deskstar to a folder on the new
Diamondmax. I detached the old Deskstar as
a slave and rebooted with only the Diamondmax,
and the system failed to boot.
Somehow, the process of adding, then removing
the Deskstar made the system unstable. In
particular I just got a black screen following
the bios/setup info, the point at which XP should
start to boot from the HD. The bios was detecting
the Diamondmax, but XP could not boot from it.
I figured, maybe I just did it wrong, perhaps
I should have run that little registry tweak
utility from windows to "fully" enable +137GB
drive support, even though it wasn't required
the first time I installed the Diamondmax when
I used the pre-packaged CD software to set the
drive up. I wanted to make absolutely sure that
nothing was left to chance so I repeated the
process described above, except this time, after
I got XP up, the first thing I did was to run the
"big_drive_enabler.exe" utility which is available
from Maxtor.com.
I then set up my old Deskstar as Slave again
and began pulling old data over, when it was done
I detached the Deskstar ... and the sucker would
not boot.
Same exact problem as before. Blank screen
following all of the bios/setup data.
I should also note that when I looked at the Maxtor
drives as slaves, from another XP installation, XP
failed to recognize the system partition on the
Diamondmax.
So it appeared that when my Diamondmax dies,
not only do I lose the ability to boot to it, but I
can't seem to recover the data.
Now to my questions.
#1 I did everything I was supposed to do in order
to install the Diamondmax 10 on trial 2 and 3, I just
did it with a newer version of the Diamondmax software.
I find it a bit hard to believe that it wouldn't work,
but even harder to believe that it works better when
I use an older version of the software (the CD version).
Anyone want to explain that?
#2 If you're in my position, would you risk trying
to get the Diamondmax to work, or would you just
return it? I'm fairly confident that if I repeat
the steps that I did the first time I installed it,
that is, use the CD version of the software that
was packaged with the drive then I can install
XP on it and have it running fine. Recall that
when I used the CD software originally that the
system was fine for several days, the only problem
then was the bad memory, which is gone now. But
then there is the question of WHAT IF it goes down
again. I'm not so much afraid that it doesn't work
as I am afraid to lose data permanently since
every time this drive has gone down I've been unable
to access it.
#3 What about other new drives? Are people experiencing
difficulties with newer drives? Ones which require special
preperation before they start to work correctly? Are drives
from other vendors suceptible to the same problems?
I got an idea to return the Diamondmax and use the
credit to get one of those 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor's...
In theory my mobo supports SATA, but I'm worried about
similar kinds of problems emerging.
At least for me, the security of knowing that I can
recover data from a drive by just plugging it in as
a slave (assumming no catastrophic OS or hardware
damage), seems to outweigh the benefits of bleeding
edge size or speed technology which might kill my
data dead...
Recently I had the experience of having some
bad system memory which led to corruption of
my hard disk which eventually led to not
being able to boot.
For whatever reason, when I first detected the
instability I thought it was the hard drive so
I shelved my Deskstar 120 and went to the store
to pick up an ultra ata 250GB Diamondmax 10
to replace it.
The first time I tried to set up the new
Diamondmax I used the CD software which came
with the drive: version 3.-something of the
Maxblast software.
I booted to the Maxtor CD and set up two ~130GB
NTFS partitions, which I used to install XP on.
Without too much trouble I was able to set up
the old Deskstar as a slave and copy over my
old data.
Things seemed to go fine over the new few days,
however my system eventually crashed again due
to the bad memory, a side effect of this was
that the new Diamondmax drive got corrupted.
A few days later I got my new memory and I
wanted to reinstall the new Diamondmax drive,
but first I wanted to recover data from it,
like I had done with the IBM Deskstar.
I set the new Diamondmax up as a slave but XP
couldn't "see" any data in the first partition.
XP recognized it as "unformatted" so I was unable
to recover anything from it. It could have been
that the damage done to the Diamondmax by the bad
memory was more extensive than the damage that had
been done in the case of the Deskstar, however I
had a sneaking suspicion that some of the
pre-installation voodoo that was required for the
Diamondmax had something to do with XP not being
able to make sense of first partition.
Now that my system memory was fine, I decided
to reinstall the 250GB Maxtor drive. I accessed
Maxtor's web site from another PC to get their
latest version of the Maxblast software, which
I think is version 4.
I booted from a Maxtor floppy disk (which you
make from the utility available at maxtor.com)
and went through the same process that I originally
went through to set up the Diamondmax 250. I made
two ~130GB NTFS partitions, then rebooted to the
windows CD to begin installation.
Now if you've been following this long story
here is where it gets disconcerting.
Everything went fine. XP booted up, installed
its files, then rebooted... I entered, username,
organization, time zone info, etc. Finally
installation was complete. I shut down, added
my old Deskstar as a slave, rebooted, came up
to XP and then proceeded to copy most my important
info from the old Deskstar to a folder on the new
Diamondmax. I detached the old Deskstar as
a slave and rebooted with only the Diamondmax,
and the system failed to boot.
Somehow, the process of adding, then removing
the Deskstar made the system unstable. In
particular I just got a black screen following
the bios/setup info, the point at which XP should
start to boot from the HD. The bios was detecting
the Diamondmax, but XP could not boot from it.
I figured, maybe I just did it wrong, perhaps
I should have run that little registry tweak
utility from windows to "fully" enable +137GB
drive support, even though it wasn't required
the first time I installed the Diamondmax when
I used the pre-packaged CD software to set the
drive up. I wanted to make absolutely sure that
nothing was left to chance so I repeated the
process described above, except this time, after
I got XP up, the first thing I did was to run the
"big_drive_enabler.exe" utility which is available
from Maxtor.com.
I then set up my old Deskstar as Slave again
and began pulling old data over, when it was done
I detached the Deskstar ... and the sucker would
not boot.
Same exact problem as before. Blank screen
following all of the bios/setup data.
I should also note that when I looked at the Maxtor
drives as slaves, from another XP installation, XP
failed to recognize the system partition on the
Diamondmax.
So it appeared that when my Diamondmax dies,
not only do I lose the ability to boot to it, but I
can't seem to recover the data.
Now to my questions.
#1 I did everything I was supposed to do in order
to install the Diamondmax 10 on trial 2 and 3, I just
did it with a newer version of the Diamondmax software.
I find it a bit hard to believe that it wouldn't work,
but even harder to believe that it works better when
I use an older version of the software (the CD version).
Anyone want to explain that?
#2 If you're in my position, would you risk trying
to get the Diamondmax to work, or would you just
return it? I'm fairly confident that if I repeat
the steps that I did the first time I installed it,
that is, use the CD version of the software that
was packaged with the drive then I can install
XP on it and have it running fine. Recall that
when I used the CD software originally that the
system was fine for several days, the only problem
then was the bad memory, which is gone now. But
then there is the question of WHAT IF it goes down
again. I'm not so much afraid that it doesn't work
as I am afraid to lose data permanently since
every time this drive has gone down I've been unable
to access it.
#3 What about other new drives? Are people experiencing
difficulties with newer drives? Ones which require special
preperation before they start to work correctly? Are drives
from other vendors suceptible to the same problems?
I got an idea to return the Diamondmax and use the
credit to get one of those 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor's...
In theory my mobo supports SATA, but I'm worried about
similar kinds of problems emerging.
At least for me, the security of knowing that I can
recover data from a drive by just plugging it in as
a slave (assumming no catastrophic OS or hardware
damage), seems to outweigh the benefits of bleeding
edge size or speed technology which might kill my
data dead...