New Hard Drive...broken..?

[Ben B]

Hi,

I have bought a new 80GB hard drive off ebay and the item description said that it was in full working order. However, it arrived today and on Windows XP setup, it stays at "Setup is starting windows" for ages before the screen comes up to say "to begin setup press enter" so I thought this was just because it was a large capacity hard drive so continued and it took ages examining the drive and then the licence agreement appeared so i pressed F8 to continue and then when the drive partition page appeared it said in the box which normally shows your drive "Windows cannot access this drive" so i pressed the key which said "delete partition" and then the screen went black and a blue STOP screen appeared.

I then went into the bios and pressed enter to automatically detect the drive and the info it gave me about the drive was this:

Capacity: 81GB
Cylinder: 39236
Head: 16
Precomp: 0
Landing Zone: 39235
Sector: 255

I thought the cylinder number seemed low because even the 30GB that I am currently using is much higher. So, is the drive broken or am I doing something completely wrong. I have fitted drives in this machine before and have not had any problems.

Oh and the drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L080L0 PATA133 HDD if it helps...

confused and slightly annoyed

~Ben B~

are you sure you set it up correctly and its not conflicting with an existing drive? sounds like it had a none windows partition on it. can you install it in a working machine and try formatting it that way?

I would never buy second hand componants off ebay

[Ben B]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

are you sure you set it up correctly and its not conflicting with an existing drive? sounds like it had a none windows partition on it. can you install it in a working machine and try formatting it that way?

I would never buy second hand componants off ebay

it shouldn't be conflicting i don't think. after it failed the first time i restored optimised defaults in the bios but still no luck i'm an idiot for buying maxtor anyway after my 40gb broke last year. will try this seatools off the maxtor support section on the seagate website to see if that can fix it. If not i'll have to try and get a refund and go up to bowlers next weekend and get one from there.

~Ben B~

[Tightscot]

what jumper options do you have - have you tried cable select? Is drive on primary ide channel? Is drive only ide device on that channel?

[Ben B]

Originally Posted by Tightscot

have you tried cable select?

Just Tried, and also without jumper (slave), still no joy

Originally Posted by Tightscot

Is drive on primary ide channel?

Yep.

Originally Posted by Tightscot

Is drive only ide device on that channel?

Yep.

Originally Posted by ben_b

will try this seatools off the maxtor support section on the seagate website to see if that can fix it

it appears it can't, even running 'quick test' acheives 0% after an hour, i thinks its fair to say its broke.

[cleshe]

Originally Posted by ben_b

Hi,

I have bought a new 80GB hard drive off ebay and the item description said that it was in full working order. However, it arrived today and on Windows XP setup, it stays at "Setup is starting windows" for ages before the screen comes up to say "to begin setup press enter" so I thought this was just because it was a large capacity hard drive so continued and it took ages examining the drive and then the licence agreement appeared so i pressed F8 to continue and then when the drive partition page appeared it said in the box which normally shows your drive "Windows cannot access this drive" so i pressed the key which said "delete partition" and then the screen went black and a blue STOP screen appeared.

I then went into the bios and pressed enter to automatically detect the drive and the info it gave me about the drive was this:

Capacity: 81GB
Cylinder: 39236
Head: 16
Precomp: 0
Landing Zone: 39235
Sector: 255

I thought the cylinder number seemed low because even the 30GB that I am currently using is much higher. So, is the drive broken or am I doing something completely wrong. I have fitted drives in this machine before and have not had any problems.

Oh and the drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L080L0 PATA133 HDD if it helps...

confused and slightly annoyed

~Ben B~

Having had several Maxtor drives fail, I now avoid them. Seagate have served me well,though since they took over Maxell, I've bought Western Digital on the advice of my son, who knows a lot more than me about computers. Not that knowing more than me is difficult!
I too would never buy a second hand drive. Anyway , they're so cheap these days, why bother?