T
Todd Mancini
I have a Dell Precision WorkStation 420, loaded with latest BIOS,
which has worked like a champ for many years.
I've found the need to reinstall XP Pro for the first time. My course
of action has been to install a new hard drive and do a clean install
on the new hard drive, leaving the old drives in place.
I have two hard drives running off of the motherboard IDE (one of them
being the original boot drive).
I also have a 3rd hard drive running off of a Promise ATA-100 card.
For the upgrade, I removed the ATA-100 card and replaced it with a
Belkin ATA-133 card. I moved the existing ATA/100 drive onto the
ATA/133 as a master on IDE2.
I purchased a 300GB Maxtor drive, and placed it as master on IDE1 of
the ATA/133.
And that's where the fun began.
First off, whenever I talk about installing XP, I really mean that I'm
installing a slipstream build of XP with Service Pack 2. So large
drive support should be built-in to the OS without a need for patches.
For the life of me, I cannot get a 'stable' configuration. If I
create a single 300GB partition and install XP on to it, although XP
will boot and let me 'do stuff', it doesn't seem to take a lot of disk
writes to destroy the partition table. Of course, I don't realize
this until I reboot and XP can no longer boot. (In other words -- I'm
able to reboot several times, and then suddenly I cannot.)
So, I figured a 300GB boot partition was just too much for XP to
hanldle, and repartitioned the drive into a 137GB boot partition and
the remainder as an extra partition.
This appeared to be much more stable. I even went as far as to fill
both paritions to nearly full capacity, just to see what would happen.
I even had diskeeper 8.0 running on them. XP had no problem
rebooting for the past 4 days.
Until today, of course. XP would start to boot, but then it would
reset the machine and start all over again. In safe mode, I could see
all of the drivers loading, but about the time you'd expect it to show
the welcome screen, the machine resets itself.
So, I go back to my original XP installation on the old drives, and I
notice that my Maxtor doesn't even have a partition table anymore.
Does anyone have ANY ideas? I've been working at this for about a
week; I think I've installed XP about 7 times. (When it would allow
me to install it -- many times, the new Maxtor disk couldn't even be
seen, I'd have to play with various BIOS settings and try to get the
Maxtor-supplied MaxBlast software to 'prep' the hard drive for XP.)
(The gist of the BIOS changes were to rank the Maxtor either higher or
lower than the BIOS drives, depending upon what I wanted to do.
Sometimes I had to physically detatch the drives to get the BIOS to
'clean' itself so it would correctly recognize the Maxtor drive after
a failed installation.)
The hard drive passed all of it's diagnostics (took about 90 minutes).
I didn't run a full burn test, however.
Should I look at returning the drive? The controller? Both? I just
don't know what to do.
Thanks so much,
-Todd
PS: I've contaced both Maxtor and Belkin, but neither have been a lot
of help.
which has worked like a champ for many years.
I've found the need to reinstall XP Pro for the first time. My course
of action has been to install a new hard drive and do a clean install
on the new hard drive, leaving the old drives in place.
I have two hard drives running off of the motherboard IDE (one of them
being the original boot drive).
I also have a 3rd hard drive running off of a Promise ATA-100 card.
For the upgrade, I removed the ATA-100 card and replaced it with a
Belkin ATA-133 card. I moved the existing ATA/100 drive onto the
ATA/133 as a master on IDE2.
I purchased a 300GB Maxtor drive, and placed it as master on IDE1 of
the ATA/133.
And that's where the fun began.
First off, whenever I talk about installing XP, I really mean that I'm
installing a slipstream build of XP with Service Pack 2. So large
drive support should be built-in to the OS without a need for patches.
For the life of me, I cannot get a 'stable' configuration. If I
create a single 300GB partition and install XP on to it, although XP
will boot and let me 'do stuff', it doesn't seem to take a lot of disk
writes to destroy the partition table. Of course, I don't realize
this until I reboot and XP can no longer boot. (In other words -- I'm
able to reboot several times, and then suddenly I cannot.)
So, I figured a 300GB boot partition was just too much for XP to
hanldle, and repartitioned the drive into a 137GB boot partition and
the remainder as an extra partition.
This appeared to be much more stable. I even went as far as to fill
both paritions to nearly full capacity, just to see what would happen.
I even had diskeeper 8.0 running on them. XP had no problem
rebooting for the past 4 days.
Until today, of course. XP would start to boot, but then it would
reset the machine and start all over again. In safe mode, I could see
all of the drivers loading, but about the time you'd expect it to show
the welcome screen, the machine resets itself.
So, I go back to my original XP installation on the old drives, and I
notice that my Maxtor doesn't even have a partition table anymore.
Does anyone have ANY ideas? I've been working at this for about a
week; I think I've installed XP about 7 times. (When it would allow
me to install it -- many times, the new Maxtor disk couldn't even be
seen, I'd have to play with various BIOS settings and try to get the
Maxtor-supplied MaxBlast software to 'prep' the hard drive for XP.)
(The gist of the BIOS changes were to rank the Maxtor either higher or
lower than the BIOS drives, depending upon what I wanted to do.
Sometimes I had to physically detatch the drives to get the BIOS to
'clean' itself so it would correctly recognize the Maxtor drive after
a failed installation.)
The hard drive passed all of it's diagnostics (took about 90 minutes).
I didn't run a full burn test, however.
Should I look at returning the drive? The controller? Both? I just
don't know what to do.
Thanks so much,
-Todd
PS: I've contaced both Maxtor and Belkin, but neither have been a lot
of help.