Maxtor Hard Disk is fsking up!

[Neuromancer]

I bought a 61.4 GB Maxtor hard disk which worked perfectly with Windoze ME. I couldnt write to it in Win2k, but I could read perfectly from it. In Mandrake 7.1, however, I can neither write nor read to it. If I do attempt to read it, the computer freezes up and I have to restart. Any idea what's causing this problem? (I really, desperately, need to backup all my data!)

[bdg1983]

Are you saying that WinME installed and works perfectly on the Maxtor? W2K is installed on another drive and cannot write to the Maxtor although it can read from it? Mandrake is also installed on another drive and cannot read or write at all to the Maxtor?

How are your drive(s) configured? ATA66/100?

It's been a long day and I may not be understanding your problem.

[Neuromancer]

Well, all of the OSes are instaleld on my primary Seagate drive. I just bought my Maxtor drive to store files.

Oh, and they are ATA100.

[hungarian]

I don't think it's the hard drive.
I assume that whatever chipset your motherboard has is not fully supported by drake 7.1 , it sounds like just a configuration issue.

try to install drake 7.2 or another distro.

Fort example RH 6.2(I did not have a copy of 7) had problems on the new KT133A chipset on a PC I tryed it, while Suse 7 just loves it.

[Lorithar]

*peers*

both drives are ATA100?

What is reported in dmesg |more for the maxtor drive...
What does hdparm report for the Maxtor...

what kernel version are you running, and what version of ide-driver are you running ...
cat /proc/ide/drivers for ide-driver

[Neuromancer]

Actually, I have 7.2 installed. :-(

[hungarian]

My output is [frank@babe Assignment1]$ cat /proc/ide/drivers
ide-cdrom version 4.58
ide-disk version 1.08

This is on RH 7

Check yours on drake 7.2.

Now, I installed Suse 7.0 on two different PC, where both had Maxtor DiamondMax DM45+ 7200 RPM 15GB drives ATA 100 and no problems.
Worked with ext2 and reiserfs also.

How old is your BIOS ? Usually a BIOS update and careful checking of BIOS properties can fix some weird problems.
Especially on new motherboards, BIOS upgrades fix bugs rather than adding new features.

[daWabbit]

And your W2K problem is that the OS doesn't support ATA-100. Patches due soon, but not yet.