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View Full Version : Windows 2K, big drives and a tale of woe


Mournblade
07-22-2005, 01:21 PM
I don't know if this should be in Operating Systems or not but it concerns a harddrive too.

Recently several videos that did work stopped working (mainly WMV's funnily enough) and I put it down to the fact that I borked my codecs while messing around with various filters so I didn't think much of it. The drive they were contained on is a Maxtor 160gb DiamondMax Plus 9. I've never had a problem with Maxtor's before.

However the other day I suddenly found that I couldn't access a folder on the drive. I shut down and managed to restart the machine but a run through with AVIcodec revealed that some 40 files (or 15gb worth) had been lost in the corruption and some filenames had been linked to other videos (a bbc documentary starts playing NIN Hand That Feeds video). Not good.

So I think that the HDD is fairly new (9 months old) and doesn't get a 10th as much abuse as the 120gb drive does in the same machine so I think it is the shitty 400W QTEC power supply that I have in there. I swap that out for a 300W Macron PSU I had spare and restart.

A day later the same happens again and I lose another 10gb. So I decide to RMA it but first I need to copy off some of the data - and I don't have enough storage space for it all. So talking to the guy on the phone he suggests running it through the Maxtor PowerMax tests. "Can't hurt" I think to try it so I download the ISO image from Maxtor's site and attach the drive to my main rig.

Run the tests and even run the SMART readings from SpeedFan and everything checks out okay. I haven't had a problem so I started digging deeper.

According to It appears that Windows 2000 and XP have a problem with large drives prior to SP3 as detailed here (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098) and Maxtor has a fix for it. The reason it didn't bork in my main rig is because it uses the Intel chipset drivers as detailed here (http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_lva=1392&p_faqid=960&p_created=1016214655). Obviously VIA don't see this as a problem (though I haven't updated my VIA chipset since 4.42 so it might have been fixed since then). However I have been running SP4 since about a month after it's release and the drive is newer than the OS install (and therefore shouldn't be affected)

So finally I get to my question: Has anyone else come across this problem and if so did the Maxtor Large Driver Enabler (http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=11) or the newer VIA drivers fix the problem and therefore will be safe for me to replace the harddrive or should I just leave the 160gb drive in my main rig and just share the resource?

Strange that this should happen after a while of running nearly maxed out on space on it.

Thanks for reading. Now I have some questions about RAID but that can wait for another thread.

Lord Nassirbannipal
07-22-2005, 03:42 PM
Yes, it happened to me about 3 months ago.

I lost about 10GB of music, much of which was very hard to find. I mean stuff that I'd been seeking for years.

The only thing I can say is let it be a lessen learned. Do regular backups of your stuff. I never neglect to use my DVD burner anymore:)

Mournblade
07-22-2005, 06:47 PM
Thing is, to burn that much stuff off to DVD it would cost almost as much in DVD's as it would to buy a new drive...

RAID is the way forward. Bigger the drive, more stuff you have to lose.

Edit: You never mentioned whether the editing of the registry or Maxtor's program ensured trouble free operation after that.

Lord Nassirbannipal
07-22-2005, 08:43 PM
Thing is, to burn that much stuff off to DVD it would cost almost as much in DVD's as it would to buy a new drive...

RAID is the way forward. Bigger the drive, more stuff you have to lose.

Edit: You never mentioned whether the editing of the registry or Maxtor's program ensured trouble free operation after that.

1) RAID is not going to stop you from losing data. The best form of backup is optical media with the most redundancy possible(within reason).

2) I don't know, I stopped using Win2K after that happened.