Just yesterday I dealt with the same problem!

I just built a new computer with a 503+ and put in a six-month old Maxtor
5.7. I first fdisked and formatted the drive. While the BIOS (I used IDE HDD
Auto Detection) seemed to recognize the drive, on the boot screen it
reported it as 528. I thought this was odd, but Windows98 seemed to also see
it correctly. Not until I installed Norton Utilities did I realize that
there was a BIG problem.

I ended up calling Maxtor and talked with a helpful tech you told me that
the BIOS was not recognizing LBA (even though it said it did). By going to
the BIOS  Standard CMOS Setup screen, and changing the drive to "auto" in
the "type" and "mode" columns, it was correctly recognized at bootup (it
does a drive recognizing bit) and all the problems are solved.

The only downside is I had to again fdisk, format and reinstall Windows to
accommodate the drive's now correctly set parameters.

He told me that it is always better to use the "auto" settings (as opposed
to Auto Detection) to insure the drive's proper identification and then it
can be moved from computer to computer in the future without this problem.

I hope this helps you - it was a real eye-opener for me since I have been
using the Auto Detection method for years.

Kathy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Mark Rode
> Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 1999 2:10 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [PCBUILD] Maxtor Mystery
>
>
> I have a six month old Maxtor ULTRA EIDE drive installed on the primary of
> a FIC 503 + ....a Mitsumi CD Burner is installed on the secondary as a
> master with a Teac CD reader installed as a slave.
>
> I decided to set it up in a dual boot PC so I a FDISK it as a small 75 meg
> primary FAT16  C drive...an extended partition with FAT 16 logical drives
> ...except I made the second logical (E) a FAT32 to install Win 98. I
> planned on installing the system files and System Commander 4.03 on the C
> drive. NT on the D drive FAT and 98 on the E drive FAT32. I have used this
> setup before and it works well.
>
>  I installed 98 on the FAT32 partition ..then I attempted to
> install System
> Commander in order to handle the dual boot. During the install it
> put up an
> error message that there were overlapping partitions and in the process of
> the install it changed the partition tables so I could only see
> the primary
> C and one logical D. I restored the Partition Tables with Norton
> Rescue and
> ran Disk Doctor which saw nothing wrong..but I figured something must have
> corrupted the partition table or boot sector so I used Maxtors ULTRA EIDE
> utility to check, cleanse and restore the drive to factory specifications.
> I then installed 98 and attempted to install System
> Commander....same error
> message. I thought well System Commander doesn't like this setup so I
> decided to let NT handle the dual boot but when I started a NT install it
> got to the part where it checks the drive and reported that....
> Setup has determined that one or more of your hard disks has more
> then 1024
> cylinders.
> At this point I ran professional diagnostics......Spinrite reports 528
> megs.....Quick Tech Pro...reports a hard drive with 528 megs.
> Maxtor tells me if their diagnostics doesn't see a problem then it is not
> the drive.
> At Boot the BIOS correctly shows the drive as CHS, UDMA 2, 5763MB.
> I can perform tasks with Partition Magic 4.0 without any kind of error
> message. NDD reports no errors. Drive image 2.0 reports an error message
> that there is more then 1024 when attempting to restore a partition but
> Drive Image 3.0 does not.
>
> I am out of ideas....does anybody know what is going on ?
>
> thanks
>
> m
>
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