New Maxtor drive, ezbios, startup hangs

I installed a new Maxtor 40G drive. Bios does not recognize it so I then installed EZbios software from Maxtor to address this problem. It ultimately worked ok. But every since then, I have had to reboot at least 2 times, instead of 1, because the startup hangs every other time or so. It hangs either in bios, just after the floppy detect, or in the windows logo screen.

I suspect I will have to flash a new bios to fix it, but first wanted to see if anyone has a work around.

For example, will putting the second drive on a different cable fix it? Or must the new drive heads be fully parked before rebooting? Or some other minor detail.

Mark

 

read faq

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/home.php

 

Thanks for the tip, however, I have read all there is to read at that site and that is where (and why) I downloaded the EZbios as mentioned in my first post. I also have had a trouble report filed with the customer support for several days and hope to hear back from them, but have not as of yet.

P.S.

I just got a reply from Maxtor. I have not tried this fix yet, but I will. I would still be interested to hear from anyone else who has had this problem.

Also, this is the first I have heard of hard drive bursting problems, especially since maxtor recommends putting 2 fast devices on the same channel (not mixing cd roms and zip drives with hard drives ). I am trying to understand this better. Here is the maxtor response. I hope to get back here with the results within a week.

From maxtor:

"Dear Customer,

The problems are most likely stemming from the fact that both drives are on the same cable. When you have two fast drives on the same cable bursting at the same time (as at boot up or during a copy) you can exceed the bandwidth of the cable and corrupt the data. During boot, this can cause boot failure or failure detecting one or both drives. It can cause a copy to either corrupt or hang. You will need to make both drives masters on their own cables. "

 

Have you considered an EIDE PCI Controller Card (Promise or similar), remove the EZBios and see how they run?

 

Hi Mark

not sure if this clarifies or muddifies but: I've had v. similar problems for years with a HDD which needs a BIOS kludge - much older (only 850MB) but needs a "Dynamic Drive Overlay "... which refuses to init properly ~70% of the time. Occasionally when it says it has started it hasn't - the files cannot be seen. If it starts OK it continues OK till next restart though. I sometimes run that PC with smaller HDD not needing the kludge => works fine. HDD works fine in other PC's...
I did try the ribbon cable but it wasn't that. It's the only HDD in that PC so cannot be clashing with anything else on the same ribbon...
so possibly other things going on?
Good Luck, Hugh.

 

As outdated as it is I still perfer to use F Disk. I have seen too many issues with the utilities from WD and Maxtor for the HDD's so I stay away from them. Especially if the drives would ever be moved to another machine.