Problem with Diamond Max Plus 9

Lord Alibaski · 9 Feb 2007 at 16:47

I have a problem with an old Maxtor Diamond Max plus SATA 9.

The drive actually works fine on my pc. Though as soon as I put the drive into a friend’s pc it crashes the pc. We get a blue screen but it disappears to fast when the blue screen pops up so we can’t see what it actually says.

The motherboard my friend has is the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe with 2 SATA ports. The pc already has 1 of these drives in already working perfectly. I have unplugged the other SATA drive and used the exact same plugs on the drive that keeps crashing but it still keeps crashing, even with new SATA cables the drive still crashes the pc. I have plugged the drive that works into the 2nd SATA port and that works fine but guess! The other drive crashes the pc still.

I have also cleared the cmos, even formatted the drive and done numerous tests on the drive and they have all passed but as soon as I plug the drive in it will crash the pc.

I have put the drive back into my pc and it works fine.

Anyone any ideas on what could be causing this. I have had a similar problem before with another drive but as soon as I formatted the OS the drive worked perfectly, do you think this could fix the problem with this one (I know I could just try and format and see for myself but I just don’t really want to format my friends pc at the moment).

rpstewart · 9 Feb 2007 at 17:56

Lord Alibaski said:
The drive actually works fine on my pc. Though as soon as I put the drive into a friend’s pc it crashes the pc. We get a blue screen but it disappears to fast when the blue screen pops up so we can’t see what it actually says.

You should be able to press F8 on boot up and disable the BSOD auto reboot.

I'm a little confused though, you say in your post that you've formatted the disk then at the end wonder whether you should format it or not. Have you wiped the disk or not?

When it BSODs do you have both drives in your friend's PC?

What are you actually trying to achieve? Adding another disk to his PC?

Lord Alibaski · 9 Feb 2007 at 18:56

Ok....All I did was bring the drive from my house which was full of media, all I was doing was adding the drive to the new pc which should have just booted up and noticed the drive.

Though on the actual boot up it gets to the windows logo and just crashes and reboots. So yes all I was doing is trying to add this disk to my friends pc.

I will try disabling the BSOD auto reboot in the BIOS and see if this fixes the problem.

Lord Alibaski · 9 Feb 2007 at 18:57

By the way the only drives I have plugged in the pc at the time are the OS drive and the drive I brought with me.

rpstewart · 9 Feb 2007 at 19:10

I've just had a check of the manual for the A7N8X, the SATA controller is one of the early Silicon Image ones which doesn't support single drive operations all that well (it treats the disk as a single disk RAID0 array).

Have you checked to see if the SI BIOS is detecting your disk OK - just be careful that you don't go and create an array on it in case the BIOS decides to wipe it for you.

Lord Alibaski · 9 Feb 2007 at 19:37

rpstewart said:
I've just had a check of the manual for the A7N8X, the SATA controller is one of the early Silicon Image ones which doesn't support single drive operations all that well (it treats the disk as a single disk RAID0 array).

Have you checked to see if the SI BIOS is detecting your disk OK - just be careful that you don't go and create an array on it in case the BIOS decides to wipe it for you.

Yeah I know of this problem myself because the board my friend as was actually my board.

Will get back to you later m8.

Lord Alibaski · 14 Feb 2007 at 23:22

Got it working now...Was a funny one though because I had 1 drive working perfectly by itself....Tho as you said m8 you can only run 2 drives in RAID 0 which will make 2 drives into 1 big drive...ashame really, would have thought a BIOS upgrade would have let you configure it so you could use them seperately without having to partition them.