Odd Maxtor issue. Corrupt firmware/board?

sirlemonhead · 4 Apr 2006 at 19:48

Decided to give my pc case a clean out, as i've done numerous times before. A Chieftec case, so I remove the drive cage that has my Maxtor 6B200M0 200 gig sata drive and my old WD Ide drive in it, set it aside and clean the case out.

I put everything back together, power on....Sata bios thingy doesn't see the Maxtor. It's my main drive with 200 gigs worth of stuff I really don't want to lose

Running an AsRock Dual board with the Maxtor on one of the standard Sata 1 ports. Pc wont boot at all If i try the drive on the Sata 2 port. Not sure what that's about..anyway..

Try the usual stuff, different sata ports, cables, power leads, minimal hardware config, bios reset, you name it. No go on the Asrock board.

Pull out my old Abit NF7-S board, and lo and behold, the Maxtor is picked up. PowerMax doesnt seem to work, as it can't detect any drive attatched to the machine, but that could possibly be an incompatability with the controller on that board? ( I heard the maxtor software can be a pain in this regard )

Windows XP on that machine won't see the drive either. Nothing in Disk Management.

The drive sounds healthy...spins up and keeps whirring along happily like usual. No clicking or clunking or anything scary.

Occasionally the Bios *won't* pick up the drive, forcing me to do a reboot. Occasionally it incorrectly reports the model name of the drive as being a "Maxtou" And occasionally also misreports the drive capacity as being around 130-140 gigs in total.

Seeing as that's happening, and the drive mechanics themselves sound fine, I'm assuming this might be a drive firmware/circuit board issue?

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm nearly 100% certain the drive couldn't have suffered any electrostatic damage. And it was also fan cooled for the entire year and 3 months that i've had it.

I really want to get my data off the drive

Is there anything I can do? I was briefly reading threads about people having to flash their Maxtor firmware due to incompatabilities with NForce 4 boards, and am wondering if doing something like this to my drive might be a cure?

I'll appreciate any suggestions that get thrown at me

sirlemonhead · 5 Apr 2006 at 13:29

Skilldibop, sorry I wasn't too clear. The drive is my OS drive,and i've already installed XP onto an old 10 gig drive alongside the Maxtor, and had no luck with it. Just won't appear in Windows or any other hardware identification program.

Steves_pc, I presume i'd only see the firmware revision number on the drive label? I'll yank it out when I get home and have a look. It's a DiamondMax 10 I think. Whatever revision that came with only a sata power connector, and not with a sata power connector plus molex power connector.

Cheers guys, i'll go check the drive details from the labels later and do a bit of reading on this firmware issue and get back to you

sirlemonhead · 7 Apr 2006 at 22:00

Just tried getting a firmwarm update to work, and no luck. The program says it cant find any drives. I guess my Sata controller is unsupported by the Maxtor program seeing as it's a Raid controller :\

I found out that i'm currently running the BANC1B10 firmware though. I had to check the drive label to find that out, the drive is completely undetectable in windows and no amount of cable wiggling seems to fix that. My Asrock board doesnt even detect the drive on the sata controller AT ALL.

sirlemonhead · 8 Apr 2006 at 16:50

I cant even boot my Asrock board with it on the Sata 2 port. The board just freezes after counting up the ram.

It's picked up by the bios on my Abit board, but after that, no programs can detect the drive :\ I've tried windows, maxtors tools and a knoppix live cd too. No luck.

The only other sata device I can test is using an Abit adapter to hook an IDE drive up to the Sata ports. That works fine.

Do you think its just the controller? It sounds like the drive is spinning fine..

sirlemonhead · 9 Apr 2006 at 00:12

Steves_pc said:
It's not sounding too good is it, When you say tried in windows was that under Disk Management?

Just wondering if it's somehow lost the partition info, although that doesnt explain why it suddenly not detected on the asrock, if it's not that then even i'd be thinking it was the controller too.

Yeah cant see it at all under disk management.

What's worrying me is that it occasionally misreports the size on the Abit board, and occasionally calls it a "Maxtou" drive :mad:

sirlemonhead · 10 Apr 2006 at 13:52

I'll try the drive on a friend's machine at the weekend and see if I have any luck with that, or else i'll try get hold of one of those converters to allow me to plug the sata drive into an IDE port.

Worth a shot I guess