Ok i have a Maxtor DiamondMax Hard Drive (60GB) and the previous owner apparently had Windows NT on the drive, I have tried to Reformat the drive several times and nothing seems to work, i have tried putting it in a slave mode to a another drive running Windows XP Home and go to my computer and the drive shows up but i can't access it's contents and it gives me an error message: "IRQL Less than Equal" or something like that.(In UBuntu Linux when i try it says "can not Mount drive" and then says something about raid settings) I keep thinking Master Boot Record But im not sure, if anyone can help it would be appreciated. thanks,
It's sound like your Master boot record or sector is damaged. I had a drive like this and it would not format with XP or vista setup CD's. Use a Windows 98 boot CD and the Fdisk command to delete old partitions and create a new one. Then format using your XP setup CD. If that doesn't work then it's broke. Toss it.
Maxtor's DOS utility has a low-format utility that will return the hard drive to factory condition, while mapping around any bad sectors that it finds. If this does not fix it, toss it in the trash...if the maxtor utility can't fix it, you shouldn't even trust it for temporary storage.
