Maxtor 300GB IDE drive problem.

[SE14man]

I have a 300GB Maxtor drive plugged into this pc.
Only recently i've noticed that when i do work on it defrag it etc it would realy slow things down and nothing would respond quickly and everything would be relaly slow moving.
The drive is 'D:' if i were to play a song file off D: i cant really explain it but the play back would be kind of jitery like the music would sound like 4 cuts per beat it would sound all wierd not corrupted but juss really slow sounding.
If i dont do anything on drive D: everything is fine its just if i play a file or read something on it or write to it it will really slow the pc down.

It never used to do this, how do i stop it?

Cheers people.

[Cobra]

Moved to the Computer forum.

OK, here's what to try and do. I see you are running Win XP.

Firstly, you will need to know what channel your hard drives are on. They should be on the primary IDE channel (it's usually blue on the motherboard) but might be on the secondary channel, or may even be mixed with your optical drives. Work out which IDE channel the offending drive is plugged in to - blue is primary, black is secondary.

- Hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and press the "Pause/Break" button (alternatively, go to Start and right-click on "My Computer", selecting "Properties")

- Click on the "Hardware" tab

- Click on the "Device Manager" tab

- Expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" section

- Right-click on the channel your hard drives are on and select "Properties".

- Click on the "Advanced Settings" tab

- If it is all set to DMA - sorry, I've wasted your time!

- If you see "PIO Mode" on your hard drive channel, this is your problem. If this is the case, close this dialogue box without changing anything.

- Right-click on the offending IDE channel and select "Uninstall"

- Reboot - Windows will re-install the channel for you

- Enjoy!

If, after Windows re-installs the channel, it is still set to PIO mode, follow this again but upon rebooting, get into your BIOS (before Windows loads and re-installs the channel) and check that your hard drive is set to DMA mode in the BIOS. If you don't know exactly what you are doing in BIOS, don't do anything - you can do serious damage in there. It could be that your new hard drive is incorrectly set up in BIOS to be PIO Mode only, and so Windows installs it as that and ignored the DMA capability of the drive.

I hope this solves your problem. I had an optical drive (a DVD writer) that killed my PC every time I used it to write or read.

Let us know if it work, and good luck!

Cobra

[redwudz]

A little tip for defragging also. Do it in 'Safe Mode' and it will go much quicker.

[Bjs]

Go to maxtor website and download the hd tools , one is the "new hd install" , the other is the "test hd for fault's / problem's" .

Create the disk's as per instruction's , and restart the pc , enter bios according to motherboard manual's instruction's , disable all bootable drive's except for floppy , save , place test floppy in drive , and reboot .

Run the test's to make sure drive is fine .

Reboot , and return bios to normal setting's as before , save , reboot .

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Another problem with new drive's is people have the belief that xp will handle the formating and new drive install all by itself ... it is rubbish ...

When installing new drive's , use the hard drive manufacturer's "new hd install" disk to partition and format the drive ... you will have less problem's in the long run .

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While you have the "new hd install" disk up and running , you can confirm the jumper setup for the specified unit , and make sure they are correct ... some drive's have wierd combination's of two jumper's , while other's only use one ... make sure they are setup as required for your pc requirment's ... especially when it come's to master vs slave ...

[kschang]

Usually the drive is fine and Windows just forgot about the DMA modes. I have a Maxtor 300 in my system right now and my WinXP install has done that twice already, and it's not even 6 months old! (Though I suspect my install/uninstall of a Starforce protected game may have contributed to that)

Another hint: Norton Speedisk is NOT necessarily faster than the Windows Defrag.

[Cobra]

I'm not sure about this, but someone once told me that Windows reverts a drive (usually an optical drive, like in my case) to PIO mode if there are a certain number of read errors in one go.

If it is the case that it's been reverted to PIO mode, following the instructions I set out should work (works for optical drives, too).

[budz]

I'm not sure about this, but someone once told me that Windows reverts a drive (usually an optical drive, like in my case) to PIO mode if there are a certain number of read errors in one go.

If it is the case that it's been reverted to PIO mode, following the instructions I set out should work (works for optical drives, too).

Yup after 6 read errors the drive can go to PIO mode.

[Cobra]

Cool - every day is a school day, as they say!

Thanks budz!

[SE14man]

oh crap so ur tleling me this drive now has bad sectors?
how would i go about checking for bad sectors/fixing them?

cheers people.
your help is appreciated.

[budz]

oh crap so ur tleling me this drive now has bad sectors?
how would i go about checking for bad sectors/fixing them?

cheers people.
your help is appreciated.

I don't think anyone said the drive has bad sectors. But just to be sure test the drive with MAXTOR's POWERMAX UTILITY. Download it from the MAXTOR website. You can either create a floppy disc or cd to use the POWERMAX UTILITY. I've used it many times to test out MAXTOR hard drives. I would test the drive using the quick test first then do the through test. Just a warning when doing a complete through test it may take awhile to do since the hard drive is 300gbs. After the test is done it will tell you if the drive is failing or not. If it is then you will get a error code that you'll need to write down then contact MAXTOR for a RMA. Good Luck!

To Cobra: your welx!

[SE14man]

dont even get me started with this drive man ive had nothing but problems with it it all started with half of the data currently on it on a seagate..the problems started when i took it in for data recovery and got ripped off big time...wish i'd never paid half a thousand to get it "fixed" now..

cheers mate

[kschang]

Most modern drives have S.M.A.R.T. self diag. There's a free utility that reads the SMART thresholds and actual errors and gives you warnings ahead of time. I've tried it on my HD and it's not showing any errors so far.

[GKar]

Don't know if this is related to your problem, but Windows XP doesn't support 137GB+ drives out of the box (many chipset ide drivers don't either), it can cause problems. To enable 48bit LBA you can go to Maxtor's site and download big_drive_enabler (for XP only) which enables 48bit LBA at least ensuring you are properly able to access your 300gb hard disk.

It's tiny so I put it here:

http://members.mailaka.net/gkar/big_drive_enabler.exe

[Cobra]

oh crap so ur tleling me this drive now has bad sectors?
how would i go about checking for bad sectors/fixing them?

cheers people.
your help is appreciated.

I can see how you arrived at this conclusion, but it's not what we meant. Windows can act strangely sometimes - just follow the instructions I gave you, and it should hopefully fix it. If it doesn't, we'll take it from there.