3B2 Hard Drives

[Eric J. Nihill]

  I would like to thank Greg Woods for giving me some information
regarding Maxtor drives. His information did help in formatting
the drive.

  There does seem to be a hardware configuration problem between
Maxtor XT series drives and 3B2/310s and 400s. The problem seems
to be with the controller on the 3B2 being able to initialize the
disk. Although you may be able to formatt the disk with idtools,
if the system needs to initialize the disk during normal operation
or to write to the defect map, it will fail. This problem was 
common on several Maxtor XT series drives tried on both 310s and
on 400s. I have formatted Priams, Miniscribe and CDC drives with
no trouble using idtools.

During the course of a day, it was commom to hear the drive let out
a electronic sounding howl, freeze the system for about 1/10 of
a second, then march on. The disk stayed up and running under
full load for about 2 days. At that point, it tried to write a
bad block it found to the defect map, was unable to, and went
into a loop trying.

 Upon rebooting of the system, the the drive configuration table
was no longer there. The drive just sat there and let out an
electronic sounding static noise, with the drive access LED on.
 
 There must be a modification than can be made to the XT series
drives to get them to fly, either with pin jumpers or on the
drive board trace, but I am lost for ideas.

					Eric

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