Maxtor hard drives/Maxblast?

[Learnin]

Tried to install an 80 gig Maxtor in a 1700 Athlon system. Fdisk thought it was a 10 gig drive. I think it auto-detected the cyclinders/heads, sectors wrong. I went to Maxtor's site and got the specs. I entered the correct values and then fdisk thought the drive was about 11 gigs. Ended up having to use Maxblast software to get the thing installed correctly. Do all 80 gig drives need some kind of disk management to be recognized? A friend of mine told me he had to use Maxblast on a 20 gig Maxtor. I need tips and advice on this topic too! Thanks in advance.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

<< >>

i couldnt have said it better myself!

if you were going to ask if you had to use it, no you dont. just a handy thing for those with problems or dont know how to setup or fdisk. if that's not your question, nm.

 

[Learnin]

Well, I thought I knew how to set up drives, until this one. I know how to use Fdisk very well, and I know how to enter the correct values for the hard drive in bios. What am I missing?

 

[Maggotry]

If you're using the FDISK from a 98 startup disk, it will not work correctly for anything over 64GB. Most HD makers have incorporated the FDISK patch into their utilities. The best bet is to use the HD utilities, not FDISK.

Leave the HD settings to auto-detect. It makes swapping drives later easier. The problem isn't your BIOS.

Read this.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

what maggot said. older versions have different o/s limitations. 4gb, 8gb, etc.

btw what motherboard is this? older mobo's can only go so high without a bios update, and sometimes that's not enough. the included software will be able to fix the problem if you can't bypass the limitations, but avoid it if you can, just adds extra time to bootup.

 

[Imdmn04]

<< If you're using the FDISK from a 98 startup disk, it will not work correctly for anything over 64GB. Most HD makers have incorporated the FDISK patch into their utilities. The best bet is to use the HD utilities, not FDISK.

Leave the HD settings to auto-detect. It makes swapping drives later easier. The problem isn't your BIOS.

Read this. >>



i used the fdisk and format options from the win98 startup disk for that 80g maxtor, and it worked just fine, got 74.5 in windows xp

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044
link from microsoft on the issue

 

[Maggotry]

<< i used the fdisk and format options from the win98 startup disk for that 80g maxtor, and it worked just fine, got 74.5 in windows xp >>



That's great for you. But the point here was that it wasn't working for Learnin so I provided the link to Microsoft's site that explained why.

 

[Jerboy]

<< Tried to install an 80 gig Maxtor in a 1700 Athlon system. Fdisk thought it was a 10 gig drive. I think it auto-detected the cyclinders/heads, sectors wrong. I went to Maxtor's site and got the specs. I entered the correct values and then fdisk thought the drive was about 11 gigs. Ended up having to use Maxblast software to get the thing installed correctly. Do all 80 gig drives need some kind of disk management to be recognized? A friend of mine told me he had to use Maxblast on a 20 gig Maxtor. I need tips and advice on this topic too! Thanks in advance. >>




The 64GB barrier comes from fdisk as Elledan pointed out and you should use that patch. Other than that, its all BIOS dependent. Back in the days, my 200MMX IBM had 8.4GB barrier and I had to use MaxBlast to install it property too.