Maxtor OneTouch prevents booting

[spitfire_ch]

Hi!

Recently, I bought Maxtor OneTouch 250 GB external HD, but ran into some serious problems to get it work. I have to OS installed on my PC,Win98SE and WinXP, booting controlled by the bootmanager of WinXP. In Win98, I get as far as installing the Storage Adapter Bridge Modul (MXO), while doing that, the system crashed. This happens independent of whether I connect the drive via USB or via Firewire. If I boot while the HD is still connected and ON, Win98 crashes (black screen, blinking cursor while booting). If I connect the HD after booting Win98, it is recognized but inactivated by the system, because it was detected that this device caused system crashes when installed. So, under 98 it does not work at all.
Under XP I get a little bit further. I can properly install it, but when I try to boot XP with the drive connected and ON, it first lets run Checkdisk and then causes tons of writing errors while booting (data loss while writing). Interestingly, most of these errors refer to the internal HD, like
D:\$Mft (WinXP is installed on D:, Win98 is on C
D:\Windows
D:\Windows\System32, \Windows Fonts, \Internet logs
D:\Windows\System32\drivers
D:\Common Files\System\Ole DP, \ado, \msadc
M:\$Mft (first partition of the OneTouch drive)
N:\$Mft (second ...)
It finally makes it to the XP surface, but of course with all that errors all I can do is moving around the mouse cursor. Luckily, the problem is gone when the HD is unplugged and the system rebooted (Chkdsk finds data problems on the system drive, though, which are then fixed). If I first boot XP and then connect the HD, it strangely does not show up in Explorer or My Computer, but it does show up in the device manager and I can access it by generating direct links to it. It seems to work fine, no problems writing to or reading from it.
All these problems occur independent of whether I connect the drive via USB or Firewire. I even tried to inactivate the onboard IEEE 1394 controller in the Bios, which didn’t help, neither. Interestingly, XP wouldn’t boot properly anymore, even if the HD was disconnected, until Firewire was activated again. I only tried this once, so far.

If anybody knows a possible reason of these problems or - even better: a possible solution, I would be very grateful!

Thanks very much in advance and best regards

- spitfire

My system
*********
OS: Win98SE & WinXP Home SP1 (XP bootmanager), DirectX 9.0b (both)
MoBo: Asus P4P800 Deluxe
CPU: Intel P-IV 2.8 GHz, 800 MHz FSB
RAM: 2x256MB Kingston Dual-DDR (512 MB)
GPU: Hercules Ati All-In-Wonder 8500DV, Catalyst 4.3 (98), Catalyst 4.5 (XP)
Sound: Creative SB Audigy Platinum
Drives
******
Prim Master: WDC WD400BB, 40 GB
Prim Slave: Maxtor 6L080J4, 80 GB
Sec. Master: Toshiba DVD-ROM SD
Sec. Slave: LG IL-DT-ST DVDRAM GS
external: Maxtor OneTouch, 250 GB S/N: Y63MCFQE

 

[unhappy_mage]

check in bios to make sure that the comp isn't booting from usb... other than that, no ideas...

 

[spitfire_ch]

I'll try that, thanks for the hint. But it doesn't look like it was booting from USB, since XP does boot, but creates tons of writing error messages for its system drive, not the external drive.But I'll give it a try, I don't have any more ideas, neither

Thanks!

Pesche

 

[spitfire_ch]

The XP problem is solved, finally. After the described writing errors at start up sometimes even occurred with the external HD being disconnected, I decided to install an older image of XP. During the first start after doing that, nearly each partition of my internal drive was full of system errors which were corrected. To my shock, the second partition was not accessible any more after the first start, but this was corrected by CHKDSK during the next start up. Now, everything works perfectly. As somebody suggested, the Master File Table must have got corrupted, which would explain why I always got those $Mft writing errors. It had nothing to do with the external drive at all, the broken system simply couldn’t deal with it anymore.

The problem of the new partitions not being shown in Explorer or My Computer was a different one, caused by TweakUI:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;191579

So, this leaves only Win98 to be troubleshooted, which is installed on a different hard-drive and hence could not have been influenced by the XP mess. But 98 is not that important, now that it works perfectly with XP.

Thanks a lot for all your help and suggestions!

- spitfire