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7horeau · 07-04-2007, 08:34 PM

Hi;
I just went through the same problem with an eBay 120 Gb Maxtor HDD.
I'm not a computer technician, just an average user. I'll just tell you how I got through the problem and if all else fails you might want to try something similar.

First of all let me say that I think my Abit NF7-S2 Mobo was a contributing factor to my problem. Its awful finicky about how the IDE connections are being allocated.

To make a long story short i booted with a Win98se boot floppy and used fdisk /mbr and fdisk to create and format a Fat32 partition.

Later I used System Commander and Partition Magic from Powerquest to switch to NTSF. I probably could have used the XP installation to reformat to NTFS but I wanted to be able to keep better control over the system transition.

With two maxtor drives, one on IDE channel 1 as master and one on IDE channel 2 as master or slave (using the jumpers), the drives would show in Bios but in windows the secondary drive would be missing. Disconnecting the primary slave (NEC RW ND-3550a DVD burner) would cure the drive problem,but introduce a CD problem.

I finally set everything at cable select and then everything was recognized in order. This was a result of simple trial and error. There is probably a simpler fix but I haven't come across it yet.

07-04-2007, 08:34 PM	#8 (permalink)
7horeau Registered User Join Date: Jul 2007 Posts: 15 OS: xp	Re: maxtor unreadable? Hi; I just went through the same problem with an eBay 120 Gb Maxtor HDD. I'm not a computer technician, just an average user. I'll just tell you how I got through the problem and if all else fails you might want to try something similar. First of all let me say that I think my Abit NF7-S2 Mobo was a contributing factor to my problem. Its awful finicky about how the IDE connections are being allocated. To make a long story short i booted with a Win98se boot floppy and used fdisk /mbr and fdisk to create and format a Fat32 partition. Later I used System Commander and Partition Magic from Powerquest to switch to NTSF. I probably could have used the XP installation to reformat to NTFS but I wanted to be able to keep better control over the system transition. With two maxtor drives, one on IDE channel 1 as master and one on IDE channel 2 as master or slave (using the jumpers), the drives would show in Bios but in windows the secondary drive would be missing. Disconnecting the primary slave (NEC RW ND-3550a DVD burner) would cure the drive problem,but introduce a CD problem. I finally set everything at cable select and then everything was recognized in order. This was a result of simple trial and error. There is probably a simpler fix but I haven't come across it yet.