Hi,

I have maxtor powermax plus 8 and its not detecting in windows/dos. At the boot it shows in bios and i get error messages saying primary master drive is failing. I attempted to replace circuit board w/ same model different revision and same problem. what could it be?

Hi,

if it isn't clicking, most probably has FW problem (at least).
If U need the data, find some expert with the appropriate equipment, if not, well, U can sell it as spare parts, put it on your wall, or use your creativity

regards,
pepe

there is no easy answer to your question and that's probably why you wont get a lot of replies. I'm not an expert and I'm only learning. I have a post going in which I asked for help on a hardware approach and I did get a lot of useful help from some good people. If you want help, you're going to have to be willing to read a lot, interpret from Russian, and learn to use an internet search engine.

You have changed your drive electronics board and that should eliminate most hardware questions except for the processor ROM. It's highly unlikely there is an issue there. The only real hardware issue left, excepting bad solder joints or connectors, is the preamplifier chip inside the sealed head chamber, the heads themselves or the platters. If you have a donor drive that was working, it is possible to change the entire head assembly with the chip on it.

It's one thing to say that and quite another to do it. There is an excellent article on this site about changing heads.

The Maxtor drive installs part of its ROM (firmware/microcode) in the drive electronics microprocessor and part of it on the hard drive. With your drive, there may be an additional flash-ROM chip. There are a couple of ways it does that on the disk, but that's not so important right now. The thing to know is that the disk needs to be able to read this firmware from the disk, or it can't start. The operating system wont be able to detect the drive until this firmware is read into memory and the drive does it's initialization.

This firmware is involved in almost all drive functions, including the spindle motor speed and reading/writing to the disk.

There are a couple of things you can do:

1)harass Maxtor by writing to everyone there you can get your hands on. There should be software available from them to help users recover from this problem. Also, they should be supplying parts and service information. Powermax is about as useless as you can get, and if you use it incorrectly, it could add to your problems. To show you what a piece of crap it is, I used it out of curiosity on a known bad Maxtor drive and it certified it as being good. The BIOS could not read from the drive, but Powermax said it was good.

2)Read everything on every part of this site. Follow links and read, read read. If you're not willing to do that, then follow Pepe's advice.

3)learn to use Google or an equivalent. I'm not going to say anymore about that.

4)pray for Divine intervention.

error messages saying primary master drive is failing

This is a S.M.A.R.T. warning message .

one cause for this message is that the defect list in the G-List is more than the allowed tresh hold in the Smart parameters.

there is no problem with the electronic board.

to rectify this you will need to do a low level format with Powermax and do a full scan with powermax also.

if it pass both these test then you can proceed to do a reset of the G-List and the smart DATA.

John Looi
You are assured that this program will to work?
Simply usually they submit a command of reading of the passport, and at the given store this command will not return the answer!

_________________
С уважением, Алесандр Розпаднюк
Фирма "СТЕК" г. ТОМСК

May be because of the jumper. I had a wrong jumper setting cause the dreaded "Primary master HDD fail" or similar error message.

Also, the IDE cable may have a bad connection.