To Nlinecomputers:

OK. I haven't personally noticed that to be the case, but that doesn't mean you're wrong.

I tried the idea of detaching the Seagate drive, in fact I tried these combinations (Master/Slave): Maxtor/Seagate (original), Seagate/Maxtor, Maxtor/Nothing.

The results were the same. I still got I/O errors, and I still can't run fdisk.


To Davecefai:

You are correct. The entire space on all of the HDs are consumed with NTFS partitions. However, the fact that the sole partition upon the bad drive is formatted as NTFS is irrelevant, since I would be modifying the partition scheme, not try to access the data within the partition. If the partition was formatted as say, FAT32, it would make no difference.

My idea was to first ensure that there's nothing that I need to keep on the HD upon which I would like to install Linux. After that my plan was to use the Linux fdisk utility to wipe out the NTFS partition on that drive, create a new Linux partition, format it (probably with ext2), and install Linux. The problem came when I ran fdisk, since it cannot read the Maxtor drive.

Also, isn't it a bad idea to low-level format? I thought that all hard drives, post ST506/412, were designed in such a way that attempting a low-level format will destroy the hard drive, since the head uses the original low-level format as guidance and isn't accurate enough. My understanding was that the media was low-level formatted at the factory, and you should then never ever low-level format (since modern hard drive read heads aren't accurate enough). The Maxtor diagnostic tool DID have an option for that, but it was my understanding that it's something you should NEVER do.




Well, at this point I've come to the conclusion that the drive is going bad, and it'll probably result in a need to purchase a replacement. Therefore, I probably have nothing to lose if I were to attempt the unthinkable.

Any suggestions for a potential replacement? I will most likely go for either a Seagate or a WD RE, and I'm leaning towards the WD RE.


Ben

The low-level option in the utility does it properly. What you should not do is use a bios routine in MSDOS for the job. There is one. If I remember correctly it was: run debug. then issue: g800.

However this only worked on thr really okd drives.

Sorry, previous post, last line was "really old drives"

Seagate bought maxtor. To check the warranty on the drive go to maxtorkb.com and warranty services. There is a page where you can enter the serial number and it will tell if the drive is under warranty. I found this out because I have a maxtor 3100 external drive that would work only part time. It seems that this model does not work well with usb if the chipset is from intel.