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Can't Write After New Maxtor Calypso Board

February 5th, 2007, 3:43

I have a DiamondMax Plus 9 250GB drive which I killed recenty. I replaced the Calypso board and got it running. It reads perfectly, but I can't write to the drive. Whether using Windows or MHDD or anything else, I get no errors and files appear to be copied to or deleted from the drive, but they aren't. If I unmount/mount the drive everything is back as it was. Formatting doesn't work. I've tried zeroing the drive with various utilities including MHDD and the trundle along haooily thinking they are doing something but all data remains intact.

I searched around and found a board which I wasn't sure would work but I bought it anyway. Later I found this forum and this topic which seemed to confirm that I had bought a compatible board.

Original: 6Y250P0062811
New: 6Y160P0042811

The firmware on both is YAR41BW0, but the 4 letters following that are different. I believe the new board is K,G,B,A and the old is K,M,B,D.

The Main Controller IC on the new board is listed as 040111300(agere Ardent C8-C1) M8FYB and the old board has a sticker with M8FYB on it.

Reads work perfectly. Files are not corrupt. I can even copy new files to the drive and they seem to work perfectly, but I suspect they are being read back from the cache. If I copy a large file like an ISO to the drive and then try to mount it it fails. Eventually I do get OS errors when what XP thinks is on the drive what is really there don't jibe, but as long as I just use the drive for reading all is well.

All and all, I'm happy I was at least able to get my data back, but I'd like to get the drive working again if possible. Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before?

I've tried using the drive in a USB/Firewire enclosure, connected to my motherboard's JMicron IDE controller, and connected to the Intel chipset IDE controller. The same behavior occurs however it is connected. I've removed the Calypso board, cleaned the contacts and remounted it a couple of times. The thing still refuses to change any data.
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