How I For A Free Hard Drive From Maxtor
August 24th, 2006 - By: Alex Bailey
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Well first of all Maxtor hard drives just plain suck. There is no other way to describe them. Anyways I bought a brand new Sata2 200 Gig Maxtor hard drive from Fry's Electronics. Switched the jumper to 1.5 Gbps because my Gigabyte K7 Triton motherboard doesn't support Sata2. Popped the hard drive in, and went to install Windows XP. Windows couldn't find the hard drive. That was no big deal, I didn't expect it to. Went to the Gigabyte website and downloaded the needed sata drivers and put them on a floppy. Restarted the XP install, and it recognized the drive fine. Partitioned it, and started the format. Went to get something to eat and came back and it was at 20%. That's odd it should take minutes to do a quick format. I tried a slow format and that completed, but the install froze at the copying file stage. Got out the trusty Gentoo live cd and tried installing Gentoo. When trying to make a partition reiserfs or ext3 it froze just like Windows. At this point I knew something had to be wrong. I called Maxtor tech support bracing myself to be connected to India at any time. To my surprise what I got was a knowledgeable and understandable technical support person. Told him my issue and he said he'd send an RMA out to me. When I got the RMA I had the same problem. I called back and he went through a ton of trouble shooting steps. Finally he figured out the issue: the firmware version on the hard drive isn't compatible with nForce3-4 chipsets. Oops! Good job Maxtor for shipping a drive that is basically DOA to tons of users. One simple solution is to upgrade the firmware. Well that's going to be quite hard to do on a computer that is not compatible with your chipset. So finally he told me he'd send me a different model that is better than what I have now and possibly more gigs. He told me to put the old RMA into that box and ship it back to them. Never said anything about my old drive which I assume I can keep. So now I'll just upgrade the firmware on that hard drive and have almost a half terabyte of disk space to play around with. (I told him I had no way of updating the firmware, because I didn't want to deal with asking people to open their box and stuff heh.) So now I'm left with the old hard drive which works perfect and the newer model :). Even though Maxtor drives suck I have to say I'm very impressed with their support. The people didn't treat me like an idiot, and knew what they were talking about.
1. Jesse | August 25th, 2006 @ 4:01 PM |
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Did you have to give any kind of proof of purchase for the already bought HDD? Cause that’s pretty cool, free hard drive.
2. Rub3X | August 25th, 2006 @ 4:06 PM |
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They ask for a serial # of the hard drive when you call which is on the label. I assume that is all the proof they need you purchased it. By that serial number I believe they can tell if Maxtor donated that hard drive to charity or was sold at a store etc. I had no receipt or anything like that, nor did they ask for it.
3. eric | September 2nd, 2006 @ 10:09 PM |
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Congrats you are now a criminal.
4. Rub3X | September 2nd, 2006 @ 10:19 PM |
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No, it’s called compensation for their incompetence. He never told me to ship the other RMA back, nor did he say ship my old hard drive back. I even asked him if I should. For those of you wondering it was a 250 gig hard drive this time, not sure if it really is a better model but it’s working perfectly. I fail to see how they shipped it to this many people when it doesn’t work with nForce3-4 chipsets. I’m not the only that is having this problem either. I’ve noticed a few people finding this blog entry by googleing issues they are having with Maxtor hard drives and nForce3 chipsets.
5. cj | September 3rd, 2006 @ 4:43 PM |
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Actually, you did lie about whether or not you were able to upgrade the firmware. I don’t know if that makes you a criminal, but it certainly makes you dishonest.
6. Rub3X | September 3rd, 2006 @ 4:45 PM |
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True but when I bought the hard drive it didn’t say under PC requirements “go to your friends house open his case and install new firmware on the hard drive”. That’s a complete hascle. I have people with sata controllers but I highly doubt they’d allow me to start messing with their hardware. If they ship a hard drive that’s not compatible with a large amount of people they have to expect this kind of thing to happen.
7. Eric | September 4th, 2006 @ 2:25 PM |
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>> “No, it’s called compensation for their incompetence.”
Oh, I see.. so if someone is stupid (in your opinion), that gives you the right to steal from them? because they are too stupid to begin with?
Maybe we should let all the bank robbers out of jail because the banks were too stupid to prevent the robberies?
Or perhaps you meant that the stress you had to go through BECAUSE of their stupidity is just cause for you keeping something that doesn’t belong to you.
Either way, you are a thief. Period.
There is NO jstification for keeping something you haven’t paid for or doesn’t belong to you.
But you keep telling yourself it’s ok.
8. bob tom | September 20th, 2006 @ 11:17 PM |
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So does anyone know if this problem has been fixed other than a firmware flash ie on there new drives
9. Rub3X | September 21st, 2006 @ 3:11 AM |
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Only way to make it work is to put new firmware on it or call Maxtor and say you can’t do that, and they will ship a new model.
10. SphinctOr | January 1st, 2007 @ 12:24 PM |
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[quote comment="168"]>> “No, it’s called compensation for their incompetence.”
Oh, I see.. so if someone is stupid (in your opinion), that gives you the right to steal from them? because they are too stupid to begin with?
Eric — You are a retard. Do you have a stick up your butt?
A lot of companies do not require you to ship back defective products, because they don’t want to pay the shipping costs.
John
11. R2H | March 21st, 2007 @ 6:21 PM |
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I’ve actually had companies tell me NOT to ship it back. Why? The reason Sphinctor stated. Easier for them to just ship you out a new one, rather than having to pay for shipping back, and then deal with an open box drive.
r2h
12. willieN | January 3rd, 2008 @ 6:45 PM |
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Well-
I work in a school board and we have installed (or should I say tried to install) MANY Maxtor external drives to use as portable student backups. They simply don’t work - niether easily nor well….
We today had three Maxtor Mini 160’s fail to mount in XP, and Vista, each with a Code 10 error. We got them because a local vendor had them on sale. Returned each and bought new WD pocket drives (external 250GB drives)- all 3 worked first time, one each on an XP, Vista and a Mac…
Maxtors suck, WD wins this round hands down!!!
13. Jordorm | February 28th, 2008 @ 12:44 PM |
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To all of you who are calling the author “a thief” … you must be some of them insane american christians, who do nothing but preach and put your medieval beliefs upon others.
I’m very close to using words that would probably make you faint, but I wont.
However, keeping something that you got from an international multibillion company is not stealing. Especially if they dont ask to get it back.. They wouldn’t have anything to do with his USED harddrive, sp he might as well keep it.. functioning or not.
goddammit i hate people with insane morals.
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