brand new maxtor drive starts failing...

[stimlaphine]

hey guys. i very recently bought a maxtor diamondmax 9 series 160gb hard drive. ive been using it for about 3 weeks and ive been having no problems until just suddenly today.

the session began normally, everything posted and i even got into windows. i surfed for a bit and then when i went to close the browser, it froze. windows said firefox was not responding blah blah so i tried the regular routine (c-a+del, etc) and nothing worked. the hard drive kept spinning until finally my comp restarted by itself and on the bios screen it came up with the message "primary master drive failed". i tried restarting, cold booting, warm boot everything, once the comp loads it would give me the error message "primary master drive failed". please help. is my hard drive dead or defective?

 

[Brad4321]

It could be a few things other than your drive. If you have another drive laying around, plug it up to the same cord and power connector. If it works, you just eliminated pretty much everything else hardware wise. Double check that the bios settings are correct. It could have changed itself to a cd-rom or whatever causing it to fail on post.

Maxtor will require you to run their software to prove it is failing/failed. If you don't, they give you a really long bitchfest, but I was able to get mine replaced nevertheless. If the bios will not recognize the drive, it will be pretty hard to run their test, so they may let you pass on that without much hassle. It could very well be that the drive failed, but it could also be a mobo controller/psu problem (which plugging another drive into it will be a fast test). I have had dead IDE controllers on the mobo give similar errors.