Strange problem with Harddrives in BIOS on KT7A-RAID

[AuraEdge]

First time I encountered this problem is back in college. Someone gave me a 2GB Quantum harddrive to copy the stuff off of and then send it back to him over the LAN (He was out of IDEs). Anyways, When I pluged it into IDE1 as slave, The BIOS picked it up as a long string of symbols in the BIOS, Instead of a quantum drive like it should have. He already told me the thing had about 100MB of bad sectors on it, so I thought it might have just crapped out. I gave it another try though. I set it to slave on IDE3 (RAID channel). To my dismay, no problems at all. Showed up as a quantum, and I could go into windows and copy the data off fine.
Ok...Isolated incedent..flaky drive...going on with my life.

Today I opened back up a 5.6 Harddrive I had put in storage.I pluged it into my IDE1 as slave. I see the name M"X.O: and some numbers and symbols after it. Since this drive is a Maxtor 9xxxxxxx drive, it looks like every other letter was replaced with a random symbol. It also showed it as a 33GB drive in the BIOS. I boot onto a floppy, and fdisk picks it up as a 8.0GB drive. I can fdisk it fine, and make partitions, but it loses the fdisking after rebooting..its not really a 8GB drive so i can understand that.
I try the RAID again..and it picks it up with the full MAXTOR 9xxxxxxx name. Fdiks then picks it up as the 5.6GB, fdisk's and formats fine.

Whats up with this? Sounds like my BIOS is screwy. Pretty sure its not normal, but I dont know of any others with this problem .

[SoopaStar]

youch...that is nutty! is the drive under warranty still? Maybe its firmware is bad. Get the Maxtor software from their website and run the battery of tests on it. They offer a 3 year warranty on their products. Try updating your bios too...if you don't have the most recent version.

Paul

[AuraEdge]

It happened to two drives, so I thought maybe it was my BIOS and not the drives.
I just tryed to copy some stuff over, and WinME will freeze up when I copy certain files. I just surface scanned the source drive, and the target drive (The Maxtor). I can copy about 500 files without problems, but if i copy certain ones, it will freeze. Good advice on the Maxtor software. I'll get right on it. I was about to Low-level it actually, but I wasnt sure if that was going to work.

[AuraEdge]

Oh yea...of course a maxtor utility only works on a Maxtor drive, and a "a.t:r drive or whatever it is isnt a maxtor, so I cant even low level or diagnose it with this. If I dont disable the ATA100RAID, the maxtor diag util will freeze up on drive detection. (I dont think it has drivers for the RAID card, and gets confused and loops).

Maybe Ill hit seagate or WD and try thier diag Utils on it. Maybe thier not as picky...
BTW I updated my BIOS from WZ to ZT, and its still weird lookin and 33GB in the BIOS.

BTW I think it just rolled outta warrenty. I got the drive first on my Pentim 200MMX, around when the Pentium II .25um first came out. Think thats over 3 years ago...

[This message has been edited by AuraEdge (edited 06-08-2001).]

[NDD]

Paul's Unofficial ABIT KT7 Motherboard FAQ (http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm) ... ultimate solution for all KT7/A problems http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

BTW - I found what was the problem (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum5/HTML/006619.html) with my HD on RAID ...

Best Regards ...

[This message has been edited by ND (edited 06-08-2001).]

[MTAtech]

I believe Abit recommends that all RAID drives be the same make and model. What happens if you put that drive on one of the other IDE channels?

[AuraEdge]

Lol. Cool ND. I still cant get over 80MB/s in any OS with RAID0's 75GXP's. Probably all that crud I have running in the systray.

Anyways back to the subject
The drive is back on my shelf. I'll assume its gone until the next comp build rolls thru my house, on which I will check it on another board. If it picks it up on that one, Then ill run the Maxtor Diags.

Anyways, I wasn't running the Maxtor drive in RAID, only on the RAID channel. The drive acted as a singular drive, and was just put there for testing. Thanks for the help guys. Im about 2GB short on backup (Which is why I wanted this drive back in function), but Got some of those cheapo CD-r's that will get me thru my fdisk/format.

Thanks again all.