>I am out of ideas....does anybody know what is going on ?
>

I don't, but I have seen this problem with the 503+ and *certain* Maxtor
UDMA drives. I tried everything, forcing the BIOS numbers by hand, using
auto in the BIOS setup and using the hard drive config in the BIOS. If you
ask the BIOS to config the drive, it will config correctly, but sometimes is
'reports" upon boot incorrectly. It never causes any problems within the
drive itself and Seagate drives didnt seem to do it. My best guess is the
BIOS version is the culprit and you should probably seek FIC to see if they
recommend a BIOS upgrade for the board. It may be in the board revision
itself.
    But the general synopsis is that this problem didnt cause data problems
or formatting problems, so it may not even be a real 'problem' at all. It
drove me crazy psychologically though. :-)

But, I can tell you that changing to LBA, or some of the other BIOS tricks
you can do didn't work for me. It was either look at it or change the drive.
I didnt have a reason to flash the BIOS, you may want to contact FIC to see
if you should do that if it causes you many data problems....

David Olds


>
>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.
>
>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.
>

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