How I For A Free Hard Drive From Maxtor
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.
Print Post