hard drive incompatible?

what kind of error you get?  What partition u using on the maxtor?  Do you set the slave and master jumper on the Hard drives?

It was partitioned into two 2.0g and one 1.2g partitions. Yes I did set the jumper to the correct position each time I moved the drive. I tried every configuration between the two eide ports on the mb.

Try setting the BIOS to mode 4 on both drives

I'm afraid that only way to get them both working is: put them on
different IDE channels. If you have IDE CD-ROM, put it as Slave to
the same IDE line where your WD is. It was previously reported by
grief experience of several EE customers, that some motherboards
have problems running Ultra-ATA and IDE/EIDE/ATAPI devices on the
same IDE channel.

 My sidekick advises me that ultra and non ultra don't sit well together, but we agree that if they are on separate buses, there should be no problem.

  However, a problem that I had once was where I had a Western Digital chipset video card and a Maxtor HDD.  Both the devices used the VL bus so timing was important.  When I told my vendor, the video card was giving me problems the first thing he said was "Do you have a Maxtor drive."  This is because the chipsets of Maxtor and conflicted with the chipsets of these cards.

  It could be that the chipsets of your HDDs conflict in some way, and that conflict still occurs over the PCI bus (both VLB and PCI work very close to the CPU bus, but PCI is better).  I have not ever seen that, but I have not worked with those specific HDDs in conjunction.

  If it is a problem with the chipsets, you will no be able to fix it with the existing HDDs.  What I would try is to try those HDDs over another mainboard.  Good luck.

I know this is porbably a dumb question, but I have to ask! Have you tried your maxtor and cd rom on the 1st IDE bus and the 2 WD's on the 2nd IDE bus? Also, how old is this maxtor drive? We handle the maxtor line, and they did have some firmware problems with this particular drive even with another of their own drives on the same bus (different size).
Dennis

I have tried to separate the two brands on different ide ports (every combination). The Maxtor is new (bought in January), the WD's bought in 1996. They are already in PIA MODE 4.

But should be in DMA Multi-word Mode 2 to allow busmastering drivers
to work.

OK first off, if Maxtor told you the Western Digital drives are too slow, take the damn thing back.  Maxtor makes the slowest drives in the world, and WD makes some of the fastest IDE drives.  Every maxtor drive I have some across has been in the trash can, the reliability of the drives is another thing to laugh at.  

Anyways, you should try to get a western digital if you can return the maxtor,  I personally use Seagate, (I have a Cheetah 9 (10,000 RPM Ultra Wide SCSI (68 pin)))  Another good choice would be an Ultra DMA Seagate, but to get the best performance you should get SCSI.  Ultra DMA is blown out of proportion.  My Cheetah 9 will boast transfer rates over 200MB/s using winbench, and it's average access time is around 3-6 ms.  10,000 RPM helps too, but the drive will be hard on your wallet ($1000 plus a $300 Mylex raid controller)

In any case, backwards compatibility should allow your drives to work, but I would try to exchange the Maxtor POS ASAP.

Good luck, and best regards,

Trumps

Trumps, give it a break will ya. Not all of us believe that transfer rate hype. Give me real world numbers and then there's something talk about. As for Seagate, yup they make an excellent drive, but their service and replacement policy stinks! Some people use their machines for practical purposes in real world environments and when the drive goes south, they need REAL support. WD and Maxtor provide both. As for 200MB transfers, bunk, and I don't care whether your using Windoz, wintune, winbench or windycity!

This situation involves either a Bios problem, firmware problem or bad drive, who cares whether you have a 10,000 rpm drive, that does nothing to guide this person in getting their system running.

None of these things work. (I didn't try returning the drive as I have already thrown away the box it came in. Don't know how to award points. Ya'll figure it out.

Thanks for trying,

Rut

Rut, don't worry about the box. Post your email address and I'll send you the name and phone number of an engineer at Maxtor that will help you with this!
Dennis

rutledgj@earthlink.net

Thanks

On its way!

watch out for EZ-DRIVE. it is unneeded and maxtor is still or some reason pushing it. i even low formated my maxtor in spite of the warnings, and now mine is working great. my advice to you, do not read the installation manual.

Your Bios might see the hard drive fine, but if it is Ultra DMA, you need to check for a setting in your BIOS that Enables Ultra DMA on your Primary IDE controller. If there isn't any then your motherboard had to come with software to support Ultra DMA. Ultra DMA is an enhancement to the original IDE transfers. It can only be used if it is activated either by a setting in your CMOS or by software. If you have neither then your motherboard Does NOT support Ultra DMA. Your hard drive should revert back to regular IDE transfers though. Question, What operating system are your trying to format the drive with? I would reccommend Win 95 B with the FAT32 system. Let me know if your motherboard supports Ultra DMA, or you have software for it and we can go from there. Disregard PIO Modes. They only deal with direct data access speed from the hard drive. Some hard drives can support PIO Mode 4 and some cannot.

Your Bios might see the hard drive fine, but if it is Ultra DMA, you need to check for a setting in your BIOS that Enables Ultra DMA on your Primary IDE controller. If there isn't any then your motherboard had to come with software to support Ultra DMA. Ultra DMA is an enhancement to the original IDE transfers. It can only be used if it is activated either by a setting in your CMOS or by software. If you have neither then your motherboard Does NOT support Ultra DMA. Your hard drive should revert back to regular IDE transfers though. Question, What operating system are your trying to format the drive with? I would reccommend Win 95 B with the FAT32 system. Let me know if your motherboard supports Ultra DMA, or you have software for it and we can go from there. Disregard PIO Modes. They only deal with direct data access speed from the hard drive. Some hard drives can support PIO Mode 4 and some cannot.

Thanks guys but I finally got it to work by setting both drives to PIA Mode 3

Well done Rut, I knew they would work together!

Congratulation ! PIO mode 3 is ~11MB/s transfer rate, but if you stuck it's OK. Yeah and
this excluding busmastering completely.

Dont Worry about what all these guys say that comment your question. Fact is: The ASUS T2P4 is the most reliable motherboard for socket 7 available today. The BIOS is often updated and now problems should occur if you use the correct settings. There are two little things that you must know: WD-HDs are often detected by the award bios with wrong speed parameters. This is not an ASUS problem. This happens to me every day because setting up systems is my profession. WDs drive-speed is in the middle field, but they are verry compatible and should make no problems at all. Maxtors (I think you own a DIAMOND MAX (great drive)) drives are a little like seagate: sometimes they do not want to work together with another HDs on the same controller, even if it is a maxtor.... ULTRA-ATA drives are some kind of terminated. This means they want to reside at the end of the cable.So use the diamond drive at one end of the cable and the on-board-controller at the other. Caution: with more than PIO-Mode3 every drive that is connected to a cable longer than 50cm or sits in a HD-frame will possibly make funny things because of high-frequency problems.
Dont worry: The T2P4 does not support Ultra-Ata, but I use a IBM DHEA 8.4GB Ultra-Ata on my T2P4 with a secure cable connection and I never hat problems (I use PIO-Mode 4).
One thing at the end:
PIO-Mode 3 uses DMA-Mode2 on the T2P4. No drive worldwide available is able to connect with more than 10 MBytes/s except a few SCSI-drives at the moment, so PIO-Mode 3 will not slow down your hard drives. Use PIO-Mode 3 for WDs and PIO-Mode 4 for your DIAMOND MAX and you will have fun until your CPU dies.
PIO-Mode 3 : up to 13.3 MByte/s
PIO-Mode 4 : up to 16.6 MByte/s
Ultra-Ata (Ultra-DMA-33) : up to 33.3 MByte/s

It was waiting for removal Joel!

SORRY,
my brother logged in under my username and did this.

Will not happen again.

PS.. THis is a good question, I do not think it should be removed, but archived.

Joel

don't know any other way to get rid of this question although I think I fixed the problem myself :)