Maxtor DiamondMax Plus HD Problem

[Dominus]

When in doubt, set your CPU back to it's rated speed. Not sure about the newer Maxtors, but the old ones couldn't handle a PCI bus speed higher than 33mhz, and since your CPU is using a 75mhz fsb, that means your PCI bus frequency is at 37mhz. Try try setting it back at the rated speed, and if this problem persists, backup your data on some other device (not another partition) and try performing a LLF with maxdiag.exe.

[ENVY]

A severely fragmented drive will operate that way.Normally a 5 week old drive would not be so bad but you might try running a scandisk and then defrag.

[ENVY]

A severely fragmented drive will operate that way.Normally a 5 week old drive would not be so bad but you might try running a scandisk and then defrag.

[alving]

Here's the problem. I've only had a Maxtor 20.40GB EIDE ULTRA-DMA/33 3.5LP 7200RPM DIAMOND MAX PLUS hard drive installed on my system for 5 weeks and all of a sudden it starts to act strangely with a clicking sound and something that sounds like its trying to access the disk (it starts up then quits, starts up and quits, and so on). Needless to say this wreaks havoc on my system since it freezes it up forcing me to reboot.

Then other strange things happen when attempting to reboot. The BIOS may or may not recognize the presence of the Maxtor HD due to the HD continuing its strange noises at reboot time and even at startup after shutting down the power to the system for a few seconds.

I ran the Maxtor HD diagnostics and nothing came of it (no errors reported). I also ran the Ontrack Data Advisor Diagnostic Software (a troubleshooting HD disk utility) and again no errors reported.

My system is made up of:

ASUS P2B-F Mainboard
Celeron 400Mhz@450Mhz
256MB PC133 HSDRAM
LS-120 Super Disk Internal (Bootable)
Maxtor 20.40GB EIDE ULTRA-DMA/33 3.5LP 7200RPM DIAMOND MAX PLUS
Plextor 32X UltraPlex SCSI CD-ROM Internal
Jaz 1GB SCSI Drive Internal
Zip 100MB SCSI Drive External
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Host Adapter
ATI Rage Fury 128 Video Card
Hauppauge WinTV PCI Card
Quantum 3D Obsidian2 X-24 Voodoo2 Card
Diamond MX300 Sound Card
3COM Fast EtherLink XL 3C905B-TX NIC
3COM/USR 56K External Voice Fax/Modem Pro (USB)
Hitachi 19" SuperScan Elite 751
MS Natural Keyboard
MS IntelliMouse

I've tried disconnecting and removing non-essential expansion cards and even returned the Celeron back to its 400Mhz setting to no avail. The Maxtor HD still is giving me problems. By random chance, I believe, it seems to operate fine for a very short time, but then soon after begins its strange behavior.

Anyone have the same HD and/or experienced the same problems with this HD or any other HD? Any thoughts or comments?

BTW, I can't just return or exchange it since buy.com has a 30 day return policy which this HD is almost 2 weeks past. Only other option is to convince Maxtor to give me an RMA even though the diagnostic tests indicate no errors on the HD.