Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Issues

I have a 10 gig hard drive, and a 20 gig hard drive that were running fine on one IDE cable. Recently my friend said his USB portable hard drive had gone bad, but I was pretty sure he had just managed to screw it up somehow. He offered it to me, and if I got it fixed, I could keep it, otherwise I should just toss it. As my machine is pretty old and only running with USB 1, I decided to pull the drive open and use it as an internal. I took it apart without too many problems (mostly just screws that I was worried about stripping) and put it on the primary IDE cable as a slave. The jumpers are fine, and it recognizes the drive for its capacity (114 gigs) but initially it wouldn't read the drive. I used the computer management tool to format the drive in NTFS and that went fine. I also moved the 20 gig drive to the 2nd IDE cable as a slave as well.

My problem is that when I try to move files between these to drives, I get a "Delayed Write Failed" error. The message goes on to say "Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\Harddiskvolume2\Filename. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere."

Other than the hard drives, my system is a P3 700 mhz, with 512 mb SDram, and I'm running win2k service pack 4 with all the updates that Microsoft offers.

What I want to know, is there some way to solve this without just tossing the drive?

All the help that people can provide is helpful. Thanks in advance.

 

Try the HD's manufacturing site for tools to use with that drive and see if it can find problems, specifically surface scan.

 

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software Downloads

 

Yeah, just went to Maxtor, need to find a floppy disk to install their stupid program.... who uses floppies anymore? (more of a rhetorical question, since I know they still have their moments). I'll update after I run the utility.

 

Ok, I installed the utility, but after rebooting the disk had a failure to run the program. I think the disk might have been bad, but as I don't think there are any other disks in the house, that might be the end of that option. I suppose if there were someway of getting the files onto a CD or something, that might work.

I guess my next question is, are there any utilities that people know about that can scan drives for physical errors?

 

If your able to boot from your XP cd, put the utility on the one good drive. Once in the recovery console try running it from the second hd......might work. Although my WD utility programs insisted on being on a floppy. Even putting them on a bootable cd didnt work for me.

 

Anyone that uses SATA HDD to load thier SATA drivers.

 

Ok, I ran the Windows Scandisk for bad sectors, and it didn't find anything. (I know that's far from definitive, but its the best I've got right now) After that Scan I was able to copy 2 small (50 meg files) to the drive. I tried one from my system hard drive which is on the same IDE cable, and one from the other drive. Both worked fine. After that I tried a larger file, about 200 megs, and that file induced the Delayed Write Failure messages. The disk is deffinitly not write protected if I can get small files onto it. Any ideas on a non-boot disk surface scanner?