PCA Forums

Okay, my brother's machine has been working fine for the past 5 months, i never open it or touch it or anything.

however, yesterday, at POST, drive spun up, bios recognized the drive (Maxtor 90680D4), and it said:

Primary Master Hard Disk Fail

I tried plugging the hd in several other machines with no luck, we can't even access the drive as a secondary drive on any other machine, is it fubar or would a LLF fix it? can't get into windows with it to run scanddisk.

any advice or comments would be appreciated.

Maxtor 90680D4,
manuf 4/19/99, still under warranty

If you can't access it, how do you low level format it then? I guess you could maybe see if maxtor has a utility boot disk that will do a self test, then usually those self tests will attempt to repair the drive.. If the utility disk can't repair the drive, then they usually give you a number and a phone number to call, and you give someone @ maxtor that number and they will usually replace the drive. Never owned a maxtor myself, but i guess you could search on their website for such a utility..

i can LLF it in the CMOS setup.
I can "detect ide drives" in the bios, so I assumed I can LLF it also. i really hope i can salvage data though.

Download powermax from the Maxtor website. It should bypass the bios and detect it anyway. Then you can run a diagnostic and then LLF (called write verify in powermax)