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General discussion

External Hard Drive Problems

Jul 25, 2006 4:51AM PDT

I recently purchased a 500 GB Maxtor One Touch II, and I'm having all kinds of problems, please help. The drive continues to crash, after several reformats and reinstalls it still crashes.

The drive is attached to my IBM Think pad with Windows 2000, about 3 years old, via a firewire PCMCIA card. My computer is not very robust 128 ram, I am not sure of the processor (I'm at work), but it meets the minimum standards on the Maxtor box. It is formatted NTFS because that is what another forum said was the best choice, although I am beginning to wonder.

Here is how it is acting. I am using the drive to store music and photos, about 40 gigs all told. Once it is formatted and the files are moved over it works fine for a bit. Then as soon as I use iTunes to either move songs on to my ipod or if add files to my iTunes library the drive starts to fail. The boot error is that there is a problem in the Master File Table, and it usually decides that a few of the songs can't be found and deletes them in the disk check. This happens a few times until one time the **** check can't complete and the drive becomes completely inaccessible. I've called Maxtor service and they spent 3 hours on the phone with me talking me through uninstall reinstall checking the drivers and were really great. The drive worked for about a month and then the same failure.

Does anyone have any ideas? Please help.

Discussion is locked

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Save your work and then return the drive.
Jul 26, 2006 1:37AM PDT

It appears that you've bought 2 duds in a row. Time to let them keep this model until you hear it's been fixed.

Bob

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One more try.
Jul 27, 2006 5:02AM PDT

Yeah, I guess. I am going to try to reformat uninstall reinstall again, but if that doesn't work I thin that I'm on to another storage solution.

Has anyone heard of partitions that are too large for Win 2000? I've heard a few rumors about this although I've not seen any kind of official answer. Is it possible that I need to cut the 500gb into several different partitions so that Win 2000 is not overwhelmed?

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Only 300GB on Windows 2000 here.
Jul 27, 2006 5:06AM PDT

Quick notes though.

- SP4 plus all patches.
- Latest drivers for motherboard, etc. Hint: Microsoft doesn't supply these.
- 680 Watt no name PSU (seems to be big enough) in the PC box.
- No name USB 2.0/Firewire box with 300GB drive connected with USB 2.0
- The registry tweak noted at www.48bitlba.com about largelba.

It's a shame we get to do all this work...

Bob

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Not quite the title I meant.
Jul 27, 2006 5:27AM PDT

I meant by that last post that I own and use a 300GB USB 2.0 connected drive. I didn't mean this was the limit. The hard disk limits are fairly well covered at 48bitlba.com

Bob

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(NT) (NT) Thanks for the tips. I'll give it a try.
Jul 28, 2006 5:37AM PDT