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I got a Quantum AS 30gb hard drive as an rma about 6 weeks ago. I formatted and powered up and then set it aside till a couple days ago. I tried to install windows ME on it but it would hang at various places during the install and I couldn't complete it. I then swapped in my Quantum AS 20gb and installed the os no problem.
When I would try to reset, the bios wouldn't recognize any hard drives so I had to shut down and then restart every time as well. As well, Norton disk doctor and scandisk would freeze trying to do this disk.

I then tried to ghost across to the 30gb but I kept getting errors on the image. I then downloaded the powermax test utility and ran everything, it passed!

So then I went into dos/fdisk to reformat the drive and during the integrity check, the system would freeze (twice at 68% and twice at 11%) then reset to 0%.

I will be calling maxtor tomorrow about this but any ideas? I have another 40gb running with the 20gb no problem right now and have a total of 5 quantums but one 40 just failed this week and now this ones flaky.

I'm not going to do too much more work on it unless there's something I missed.

- Make sure your PCI bus clock is not off frequency - it has to run at 33 Mhz.

- It's possible your controller's going bad.

- Try swapping ribbon cables - could be a bad cable or some corrosion on the connector.

I did try different cables and its running at stock speed. I had it at 142mz for awhile but dropped it back after having problems.


Wouldn't the controller problem affect the other drive too? I could try it in this machine which has XP pro on it.

I've had two others in the Epox normally and right now also.

Sounds like you might have a bad stick of ram. If you have more than one stick, try removing each stick to see if that fixes the problem. I had this exact same problem on a friends pc. The errors were random, but I thought it was the hard disk. After running the utility to check the hard drive, all was well, but it would even freeze while running this utility. I finally nailed it down to a bad stick of ram.

I have the hd out right now to try in my old BX board to see if I can format, then I'll take a stick of ram out. They're both crucial but one from the factory and one from a retailer.

Had a ram problem once with random lockups, crucial and mosel didn't get along.
shovel the driveway first then roast beef and back on the computer!

appreciate the suggestions

I'm pretty impressed with maxtors support. No problems although he said there wasn't any warranty left on it but since it was just sent to me 6 weeks ago, they'll do it.

My primary slave channel doesn't seem to be working on the epox though as it wont see another hard drive that works fine on the master channel.

thanks for the suggestions though

Put in my spare 40gb with w98se on the epox and all the data was fine. Used Partition Magic to merge c & d then tried to reinstall The Sims--all four disks but had a hard freeze loading the first disk. I've had lots of problems with this game!

When I rebooted, I had an acpi bios corruption error and I couldn't reinstall the file.

Moved it to the other machine set to slave to get data and now its not detected!

Whats killing my drives?