Hardrive Failed Test With PowerMax Question...

Does anyone know what the diagnostic output codes from Maxtor's PowerMax 4.21 are?

I am getting this code with the "the drive is failing message"

a012049ffffffed30


any help is appreciated. :major

 

eh I'll extend on this topic to maybe help other people understand my problem and hopefully if anyone else is more hardware compatible than myself they may have a solution to this problem, but I'm fairly confident that the hard drive is bad, I was considering doing a complete format and hopefully it'd fix the broken sectors.

So...

I am fixing this computer for my friends and when I went to boot into Windows XP Home SP2 (Microsoft Yuck) The Log in screen comes up, then when I log in as the root admin it loads the background, but no icons start menu or anything open up. The task manager pops up on alt contrl del, but you can not start any tasks. At this point I figured that there was simply a virus, tryed to launch into safe mode with the same results, So I used Knopphix to retrieve their documents and save them to my flash drive then attempted a Windows XP Repair install... everything seems to go fine until the computer reboots into windows where the "setup is continuing" blue screen flashes... it goes to what appears to be the next step when the cursor appears I can move it around, but the screen just stays black and an error message appears in a white box that I do not get the time to read, but I believe that it says there is a hardware malfunction and it reboots the computer almost immediately. Now it's just stuck in that endless cycle. So I used the XP disk to try to do an actual Repair and ran the check disk which came back with errors so I did a repair and it said the problem was corrected. So I reattempted a repair install with the same results.

I was mostly wondering if there is a virus that could produce these problems and if so is there a program that I could use in dos that would help me to determine if there is a virus, or if I just need to attempt to reformat the drive and attempt a fresh XP install before finding a new drive to put into this thing.

 

How did you run chkdsk (I prefer using chkdsk /r). And what errors were found and corrected? Depending on the what the errors were, this could be totally corrupt data, and then I agree a fresh install may do the trick (I would make sure I had the latest drivers for everything first).

But if the chkdsk errors indicated more serious issues, then I agree with Halo - with 1Tb drives costing less than $100USD, spending too much time on an iffy situation becomes a waste.

I might suggest you run the maker's diagnostics on the drive too. Maxtor is now part of Seagate and Seatools for Windows can be used to thoroughly examine, and repair if possible, the drive.

Nevertheless, if the drive is repaired and appears to work fine, I would still ensure a robust backup plan was in place, and used - often.

BTW - I prefer Eraser to DBAN primarily for ease of use - it uses DBAN technology, but through a GUI.

 

yeah I do use Eraser myself on all of my systems... have been using it for quite a while now... I will check out Seatools that is the first Ive heard of that one...

I failed to notice what the chkdsk picked up on but I did to the /r and it said the errors were corrected, but it still fails the burn in test with the PowerMax program.

This project hasnt really been priority one as this computer has been broke for quite some time now, so I was hoping to find a solution without having to completely reformat the drive, unfortunately it looks as if I will probably have to or consider the other suggestion of just getting a new one to replace it.