[Resolved] resolution for disappearing Maxtor drives? (post #12)

[Groo21]

I just got off the phone with Maxtor and they indicated that there were no known issues with the NF4 and the Maxline III drives. So I RMA'd the drive back to the vendor and am replacing it with a Seagate Barracuda (lower performance, but hey, stability would be nice). I'll post if I am successfull or not.

[Groo21]

Ok. I flashed 414-3 and reset my timings to those listed in my sig

(still using Maxline III)

Turned off Audio.

Reinstalled windows, this time not installing the dreaded nvidia IDE driver.

Things seem ok. I have rebooted numerous times w/o incident.

I am now running prime stress overnight. I'll post if all goes well.

[Groo21]

It looks like the RMA can wait for the moment.

Prime has been running all night. Temps at 41C CPU, 53C PWMIC, 51C Chipset and everything seems stable. It looks like the combo of the new BIOS and no nvidia IDE driver worked! Granted I don't think prime95 does a lot of HD access, I'll have to figure out another way to verify that.

[evil4blue]

Does Maxtor's problems only affect the 16mb cache drives of the DiamondMax 10 line? I have the 200gb version of the 10 line, it has NCQ but only 8mb cache and to be honest I haven't experienced any real problems.

 

I have in fact seen the maxtore drive disappear, but my controller had gone haywire on a reboot and I had a Segate SATA also disappear on that occasion. Secondly I have also seen the checking drive integrity message upon boot, but I was in the middle of testing a USB KVM and windows kept dropping my usb keyboard causing all sorts of issues so I can't really say that the drive was the problem there either.

 

Ever since I upgraded my PSU and kept that dang KVM out of the loop my computer has performed like a champ. I have had no issues at all with corruption or disappearances on reboot and have been folding for 10 days straight without a problem.

 

Maybe I was lucky, but I'll keep a watchfull eye on my drive and this thread JIC.

[Georgia]

I was looking at the Maxtors for my new DFI board until I saw the problems you guys are having. Probably should wait for the new Sammy Spinpoints anyway...

 

Have you tried disabling NCQ?

[Groo21]

I don't know if the default microsoft driver enables NCQ by default. I know the Nvidia IDE driver does. I did not try the nvidia driver without NCQ.

 

The MaxLine III is a 16MB serial ata II drive.

 

Does anyone know a good HD stress test?

[Georgia]

You might want to take a peak at the drive properties under device manager. The guy here http://www.amdgamer.com/read.php?rid=136&type=1 had some problems with his nF4 mobo and TCQ/NCQ drives, even though it was not a DFI board and not a Maxtor drive.

 

I'm a complete DFI neophyte, just perusing these boards to prep for my first system build, and I'd hate to lead you off on a wild troubleshooting tangent. But it might be worth a try.

[silky19kilo]

hey aa,

 

How did you convert the txt (if they sent you txt) to exe. i called them and they sent me the updated firmware but it was in txt formate.

 

thanks

[Bampson]

hey aa,

 

How did you convert the txt (if they sent you txt) to exe. i called them and they sent me the updated firmware but it was in txt formate.

 

thanks

 

I received the BANC10M0 firmware as well from Maxtor. Just right-click on the text file, and go to properties and add the .exe extension after the file name. You may want to save the file from the email attachment to your harddrive first.

 

Also, as stated earlier, the Nvidia SATA controller won't recognize the drive when using this utility. I had to go out and pick up an Adaptec PCI SATA card to update the drive firmware on. It also gave some message about a file name mismatch, but I ignored that and the flash went fine.

[Astral Abyss]

My Maxtor DiamondMax 10 exhibited most of the symptoms you guys have described:

 

--Wierd behavior where Windows would insist on checking the disk for consistency upon reboot

 

--Failure to detect the drive

 

--If it did detect the drive it would often hang during booting Windows.

 

It had similar symptoms on my older Epox NF3 board. The fix I used for the Epox worked for my new NF4 Ultra-D as well.

 

Go into the BIOS and for every IDE channel and SATA channel that is enabled but has no drive connected, change the detection method from "Auto" to "None". This bypasses autodetection of drives and seems to be what was causing all my problems... my Diamondmax not being detected or being detected incorrectly. This solved every one of the problems I was having.

 

Hope this helps someone.

[Novaoblivion]

I too am having this problem with my MaxLine III. I bought it last friday so it should be pretty new. Has anyone found a solution that works yet? from what I have read here the firmware flash didnt help.

[Groo21]

Did you try firmware 414-3 and not using the Nvidia IDE driver?