HDD Help

[pogue]

I recently purchased a Maxtor 6L300R0 drive off eBay included in an external drive enclosure with firewire/USB plugs and an external power supply. The drive is 300gb, however when I first plugged it into my PC through the firewire port, it only showed up as having 279gb. It was formated for NTFS on Windows XP SP2.

I copied some files to it and it worked fine. However, since a large portion of the HDD was not showing up, I installed the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler patch. A few weeks prior I had installed the latest update to my BIOS from my motherboard mfg, so I assumed that wasn't the problem. I created a restore point prior to installing this, assuming if there was a problem I could restore it back before the patch.

However, after rebooting the drive showed up under My Computer but when I try and access it, it gives me the error message that it is not accessible and that the file and directory is either corrupted or unreadable. I attempted to run the Windows system restore, but it specifically indicated that it could not fix any problems with this drive. I attempted to remove the cord, and place it back in with the same results. I tried the USB 2.0 cord on another computer, and it is giving me the same error. The computers recognize the drive, along with the correct model number and under device manager it says the device is working properly. Under computer management for disk management, it shows the drive as being 279gb, and 'healthy' but with an unknown partition type.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm not sure why a registry patch would cause this issue. If need be, I can remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up via IDE cables. Obviously my last resort would be to repartition and format the drive if all else fails, however, I would prefer not to do this since I had just copied a large amount of data to it prior to installing the patch. If you have any advice or thoughts on this, please let me know. Thanks.

[fireydeviant]

You might try the IDE route.

Another idea would be to grab a copy of Knoppix( http://www.knoppix.org/ ).
This is a bootable version of linux, which may allow you to access the data and move it somewhere else. I don't think it will let you write data to NTFS though. It can burn cds and dvds. If you have another hardrive, you could copy the files into a partition on it.

[pogue]

You might try the IDE route.

Another idea would be to grab a copy of Knoppix( http://www.knoppix.org/ ).
This is a bootable version of linux, which may allow you to access the data and move it somewhere else. I don't think it will let you write data to NTFS though. It can burn cds and dvds. If you have another hardrive, you could copy the files into a partition on it.

The problem is after installing the patch it apparently erased my partition. I have a copy of PCLinuxOS which is similar (bootable CD version of Linux) but the drive was preformated w/ NTFS so it seems like no Windows version I've tried to plug it into will see it.

I'm pretty pissed at Maxtor, basically they told me that hard drive manufacturers measure space as 1000mb while computers measure them at 1024mb, so therefore, they're basically marketing hard drives deceptively.

I feel like making a big fuss and sending the drive in for data recovery and then sending them the bill. After all, it's their own patch I installed that corrupted my data.

:mixed-smi :mixed-smi :mixed-smi

[Project-Buckfast]

No matter how big a drive you buy or any brand it will never be the size it says it is. The same with ram....

[pogue]

No matter how big a drive you buy or any brand it will never be the size it says it is. The same with ram....

That is totally fraudlent. I think the FTC should crack down on things like that. I mean, when you really start to buy large sized amounts of HDD or RAM and it shows much less than you paid, it really makes a significant difference.

[Project-Buckfast]

Yup it sucks. False advertising IMO

[pogue]

Yup it sucks. False advertising IMO

Maybe I could put together an online petition to ask the FTC to look into the matter and try and get a lot of people to sign it. To me, it seems like a big problem thats rarely discussed, but obviously needs to be addressed.

I know just recently the FTC finally looked into Etomi for their fraudlent selling of free P2P apps as "legal", so they might actually be interested in this.

Any comments?

[tiremonkey2000]

I had a similar problem with my maxtor 120gb. HDD. I had to re-format mine to fix the problem. And my drive shows only 114.48gb.of 120gb. I hope this helps out.

[pogue]

I had a similar problem with my maxtor 120gb. HDD. I had to re-format mine to fix the problem. And my drive shows only 114.48gb.of 120gb. I hope this helps out.

Yeah, that's basically what Maxtor support told me.

The reason why the 300 gig drive shows up as a 279 gig in your operating system is because the drive size is calculated differently by the operating system. When we calculate drive size, we use the base 10 system, that is, 1 Gigabyte=1 billion bytes. However, the operating system uses a different method to calculate drive size. They use base 2, so that 1 Gigabyte= 1,073,741,824 bytes. If you divide 300 by 1.073741824, this comes up with a figure of approximately 279 gigs. By formatting the drive in NTFS (which Windows XP and 2000 do by default) this would add a couple of additional Gigabytes to your drive size, thus the total of 300 gigs.

[Nirinium]

No matter how big a drive you buy or any brand it will never be the size it says it is. The same with ram....

Pogue, This is true, Might as well round it off. Not fraudulant. Even if you bought it from Maxtor themselves, It would have been the same way. It's not a big deal anyway! Dont be disgruntled!