On Sunday 18 Apr 2004 3:37 pm, Marc wrote: > On Sunday 18 April 2004 08:16 am, Keith Powell wrote: > > I know this isn't strictly Mandrake, so apologies. > > > > My set-up here, is one computer with several hard drives each in its own > > caddy. Each drive is used for a different purpose. > > > > A couple of days ago, one of them (a Maxtor 40GB) stopped working a > > couple of days ago whilst I was using it,. So I rebooted. It started to > > boot, then stopped with the error message: > > > > Partition Check: > > hda: <4>hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status ==0x21 > > hda: timeout waiting for DMA > > hda: timeout waiting for DMA > > hda: (__ide_dma_test_irq) called while not waiting > > > > the hard drive activity light was permanently on. > > > > This error message means nothing to me. > > > > I have tried installing two different Linux distros, but neither would > > install. I then found my old Windows98 CD and tried installing that - it > > wouldn't. > > > > I ran the complete Maxtor diagnostic program, but the results were that > > everything was OK. > > > > I have formatted the hard drive, and tried various things with FDISK. The > > drive still can't be used. > > > > Googling brings up nothing of apparent use. > > > > Can the hard drive be sorted, or is it only fit to be thrown away? > > > Been there done that. There are 2 different Maxtor diagnostic utilitys, > maxblast and and powermax. Powermax is far more usefull. have you used it? > Have you tried a low leval format. I had a problem with a maxtor drive > where that was the only thing that would help. There is a low level format > utility in powermax. > > Hope that helps > > Marc
Thanks for the reply, Marc. It was Powermax which I used. I went through all the tests, including the full low level format. Powermax found nothing wrong. That's why I can't think what the problem could be. I will try another low level format and see what happens. Cheers Keith
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