Other External products

[Arus]

Hi to all,

i'm an employee of a Seagate distributor in Italy.

In the last months we've received some alerts regarding the problem discussed here. 

We check hundreds of disk every months and i can say that this kind of "fault" it's not frequent, but certainly it's consistent.

Making an approximate statistic i think i can say that 3% of faulty (faulty, not sold) hard disks that we return to Seagate, shows "the problem of 43GB".

It's really difficult to test this kind of fault... it's time wasting job seeing 43GB, format correctly when possible, testing for a while, restart pc... maybe for 4-5 times to be "sure" it's solved. and maybe it's not solved at all.

Seagate, officially, recognize this like a kind of fault or not?

[AlanM]

I spoke to one of our engineers and he said this, loosely paraphrased:

Stoney nailed it, it would seem. For some reason the LBAs are being setup wrong.
This sounds like a variation to the 'system won't boot with USB drive connected' issues which are strongest with Intel 915 chipsets, Intio USB bridge, and 500GB drives.  For some reason when warm-booting the Intel chipset would try to mount the USB drive like an internal drive, but would get the negation wrong.  In those cases it didn't mount or hung to boot process, in these cases it seems to mount as 46GB.
 
This KB covered the original symptom.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=199571
 
 
Also some motherboards have an option to mount 'USB drive as fixed disk'. That option should be disabled (may only see the option when they enter the BIOS setup with the drive connected).
Along with the normal boot issue basics... make sure the USB drive isn't in the list of boot devices. Disable legacy USB support.
 
So, can we get information posted from a few of you on which chipset or motherboard you are using?

[brandysnap]

well my motherboard is the asus p5w dh deluxe.

Intel 975X +Intel ICH7R 1066/800MHz

P5W DH Deluxe   ASUS Digital Home Series - Intel® Quad-core CPU Ready
- LGA775 socket for Intel Core2 Duo, Core2 Extreme
- Intel 975X +Intel ICH7R 1066/800MHz
- Dual-channel DDR2 800/667/ 533 max 8GB
- 2 x PCI-E x 16 / 2 x PCI-E x 1/ 3 x PCI
- Support ATI CrossFire graphics cards
- Intel Matrix Storage technology
- Dual Gigabit LAN
- Dolby Master Studio technology
- ASUS EZ-Backup
- ASUS Digital Home features

http://uk.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=248&model=1198&modelmenu=1

there are none of the options listed, and turning off legacy usb did nothing at all.

in the end i had to resort to purchasing a 3rd party pci usb card to get this maxtor drive behaving normally.

[rpbartle]

I bought my Maxtor Basics USB 1tb drive about 3 months ago and ever since have had exactly the same problem experienced by others on this thread.  On booting the computer the drive isn't recognised by Windows explorer and will ask if I want to format it.  The only solution is to unplug the power from the drive and this then forces windows to see the drive.

I have major concerns as to whether keep unplugging the drive might cause additional problems with the drive and seek some guidance.  I have tried changing the BIOS settings so that the usb drive doesn't appear as a bootable drive etc, as per the post above.  Can anyone suggest any other solutions?

Otherwise can Seagate/Maxtor clarify whether they are even looking into this problem?  If not I presume we are well within our rights to return the goods since they are not of merchantable quality and I shall insist on a complete refund.

I am running Windows XP prof. My motherboard is an Asrock Alivenf6g with an Nvidia NF6100-430 chipset.  If you require any other hardware details please ask.

Thank you for your assistance.