[RESOLVED] Maxtor Hard Drive

[mwm100]

I recently obtained a Pentium 166 computer which contained a 2Gig Maxtor 72004A IDE hard drive in it. Installed on the drive is the Ontrack 7.06 1993-1995 dynamic drive overlay disk manager program. Wanting to start with a fresh system I repartianed the hard drive using win95 fdisk, and reformatted the drive and reinstalled win95. Now when booting up the system it appears to hang for a rather long amount of time with the blue drive overlay banner info and a message to allow you to boot from a floppy disk. The red hard drive light stays on at this point constantly although I can hear no drive activity. After about 1 1/2 minutes the system boots to windows and everything seems fine from this point on. I might add at this point that I do not have any software for the overlay program other than what is installed on the hard drive.

My question or questions.

Did I make a mistake running fdisk on the hard drive rather than a partianing program from within the drive overlay program?

Should I somehow remove this older version of the overlay program and install the latest manager software available from Maxtor on their site.

If I need the overlay manager software on floppy is there a way of obtaining this (older) version?

I am kinda of lost at this point so any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[CompuDocs]

Most likely your system does not need a drive overlay, so the best thing to do would be to remove the overlay. You will need to download the MaxBlast software from Maxtor to do this. Also, if you are comfortable with this, upgrade your system bios on the motherboard. An upgrade will most likely contain the latest technology for your IDE ports, and also as an added benefit, get you Y2K ready. After getting the MaxBlast software, you should be able to go into the advanced options to disable the overlay first, if you want to see if your system can handle the full amount of the drive without it.

Charlie

[mwm100]

Charlie

Thanks for your input. I am not interested it upgrading the bios chip on this board. I downloaded the maxtor utility program mud.exe and ran baktrak to clean the boot sector. It removed the ontrack 7.06 banner which came up upon boot. I also ran the diagnostic program maxdiag and the drive passed all of the tests. I attempted to install maxblast but it hangs up part of the way through installation, when it says that it is obtaining information on the system and may take a second. I can repartitian using fdisk, but only get the 500 meg partitian. I reformatted it and get a fast boot, unlike before when it would sit for a minute or so durring booting. At this point I am still stuck with only 500 meg of the 2 gig drive and for some reason cant seem to get maxblast to install. It appears that the bios doesnt support the big drive with the present bios.

Any other ideas?

Thanks again for your input.

[mighty_pirate]

Perhaps I can help. I wouldn’t count your bios out just yet. I think you should go back to basics. If you have an Award bios, this is how it would work. When you first boot the machine, you must go into the bios setup routine and run the ‘automatic’ harddrive detection routine it has. Normally, it will detect several different types. You should pick the one that matches your cylinders, heads, etc. This info is usually printed on a label on the harddrive, or you can get it off the maxtor website. Once again, with an award bios, usually the option labeled #1 is what you want. Because you were using maxblast, it is very possible the ‘left over’ numbers in the bios are not correct. Once you get the correct head, cyl, etc. the machine will recognise the full 2 gig. IF you can not, by hook or by crook, get the bios to accept the correct heads, cyl, etc., THEN the bios is not compatible.

Good luck.

PS - If you have an Award bios, when you get the correct cyl., etc. you will see a column way to the right with the word Normal in it, usually it is best to change this to Auto.

[stevet]

One sure way to get rid of any problems your drive may have (including the overlay) is to low-level format it. This will basically wipe everything on your drive, including the boot sector and all partition information. Then boot with a system floppy and try installing the newest Max-Blast software.

You can get a good low-level format utility here:

http://www.windrivers.com/tech/tips/download/lf.exe

As for the BIOS upgrade, it probably won't help your BIOS to recognize your drive's full capacity without an overlay, but it wouldn't hurt. And when we say "BIOS upgrade" we're not talking about replacing the actual BIOS chip on the motherboard. It's a flash upgrade that you can download from your motherboard manufacturer.

Good luck,

Steve