Octopus Overlords

...this week starting Sunday 12/19 at Staples.

This is the 8mb cache version, and , according to the ad, there is no MIR here.

Oooh. Damn. That's tempting. If I weren't prioritising a better video card right now, I'd run right over tomorrow. In fact, I still may.
As an aside, I was over at Staples last week and saw an 80 gig Maxtor for $59. No rebate required there either (it did have a sign saying 'instant savings'), so I'm guessing your assumtion based on the ad is in fact correct.

I'm always FAR more inclined to go for something like this with no rebate involved. Like 10 times more inclined.

Then again, with the negative experience I just had with my brand new 160 gig Maxtor, I don't know... I did have it stored away for over a year, but still I figure it should have still functioned.

What happened to your Maxtor?

Zekester wrote:What happened to your Maxtor?

Somewhere lost among the "General Computing" threads is a thread I started about the new PC I was building a couple weeks ago.

I couldn't get Win XP or Maxtor's software to do anything with the drive. Both programs 'saw' the drive and reported the correct size (160 gig), but both programs also made vague references to not being able to format it or partition it or anything because of an error reading the drive.

I worked on that sucker for 4 days, with people on this forum saying it sounded like a bad drive, but I couldn't believe them since I had bought the thing brand new a year ago on sale and it was still sealed in the box.

In pure frustration, I finally went down to my local PC builder and bought a new OEM 120 gig Western Digital for $100 (which just killed my budget for this rig), and evereything went totally smoothly with that drive.

I've still got the Maxtor sitting right here.

I noticed when I installed some software from the CD that came with my Asus motherboard later on, that it installed some IDE drivers or something...? So now I'm wondering if maybe the motherboard software just needed to be installed or something.

So when I get ambitious later, I'm gonna try to hook it up as a slave drive and see if it works....

(And by the way Zeke, I caved in and bought HL2 finally, and this little $735 rig I just built runs it flawlessly! Not trying to talk you into buying the game or anything, but it is a lot of fun despite our activation concerns. And NO I have NOT been converted to an 'online activation groupie', but for this ONE game (and ONE operating system), I bit my lip and just did it. I really hope I'm able to still use this activation program in 10 years or everyone here will never hear the end of it!

I am completely astonished to discover there is not a single Staples store anywhere within 175 miles of me. There isn't a single Staples store anywhere near Kansas City. Why the hell do we see so many commercials for them? I would have sworn we had them around here. Huh. I could have used that drive, too.

I could always pick one up for you and you could drive up to scenic Omaha and pick it up.

Admit it, you've always wanted to meet the Metalhed/Amish Warlord.

(And by the way Zeke, I caved in and bought HL2 finally, and this little $735 rig I just built runs it flawlessly! Not trying to talk you into buying the game or anything, but it is a lot of fun despite our activation concerns. And NO I have NOT been converted to an 'online activation groupie', but for this ONE game (and ONE operating system), I bit my lip and just did it. I really hope I'm able to still use this activation program in 10 years or everyone here will never hear the end of it!

No!!!
I won't do it!

Although, I have seen the collector's edition reduced in price lately
But nope.....i'm sticking to my guns on this one 8)

Thanks Zeke, I really need a new HD and this deal really helps. I'll be there upon opening.

See if the installed drivers helped, Giles, but if they didn't (not every single one of the 125+ million hard drives shipped each year will arrive in working condition) contact the manufacturer to get a RMA. With the volumes hard drive folks deal in, a few stinkers right out of the gate is not completely unexpected and so the returns process should be fairly painless.

Best of luck,
~Neal

Maxtor has always been good about returns/replacements. I stopped buying them, however, because I had to take advantage of this too frequently.

BTW, Tiger Direct is selling 200GB WD hard drives for $89 after rebate. I've never had a problem with WD rebates - they generally arrive 3-4 weeks after mailing them in. I've probably claimed at least 20 of them over the years.

Amish Warlord wrote:I could always pick one up for you and you could drive up to scenic Omaha and pick it up.

Admit it, you've always wanted to meet the Metalhed/Amish Warlord.

Well, duh. Who doesn't? And a chance to see Omaha to boot? Wowee!

I purchased this drive and had the same problem as Giles when I tried to install it a couple of days ago.

After going through a bunch of stuff (unplugging my dvd drive to get a power cable to power the drive and having to mess around with the boot sequence so it would boot off the promise controller rather than IDE), I managed to see the hard drive. The software the came with the drive wasn't able to see it, but I was able to use fdisk to partition it, and then was able to format it. However, after I finished formatting, it said I should run scandisk to make sure I could use the drive. Using scandisk or otherwise accessing the drive gave me the blue screen of inconvenience (one of the rare times when a blue screen didn't mean I had to reboot). I then unplugged the drive and put back my dvd drive - though now it shows up first in My Computer. Also, for some reason, powerdvd stopped working (it gives me the blue screen when I try to play a dvd and when I tried to reinstall powerdvd), although nero's dvd player does.

I'm running Win98SE, and I have an ASUS motherboard - possibly there's a conflict with ASUS motherboard?

Admittedly, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to diagnose the problem - I'll try to in the future.

Also, spending a little time trying to figure out the problem, I found out some (older?) ASUS motherboards can't handle hard drivves bigger than 120gb (or might be able to with firmware?), so possibly that was the problem with the 160gb drive.

Turtle wrote:Thanks Zeke, I really need a new HD and this deal really helps. I'll be there upon opening.

Turtle, this deal started 12/19 and is going on this week.

Just in case you didn't know.

The Meal wrote:See if the installed drivers helped, Giles, but if they didn't (not every single one of the 125+ million hard drives shipped each year will arrive in working condition) contact the manufacturer to get a RMA. With the volumes hard drive folks deal in, a few stinkers right out of the gate is not completely unexpected and so the returns process should be fairly painless.

Best of luck,
~Neal

The problem is I bought the drive on sale in October of 2003, and can't find the receipt, and I had cut out the bar code to send for the rebate (which I got). And I scratched the sides of the drive wrestling it in out of the case while working on it.

So I highly doubt a return would go well at this point. I guess that'll teach me for buying a spare to have around and letting it just sit in the box for over a year.

So I'm pinning all my hopes on installing it on a functioning computer.

But I hesitate, because the PC runs absolutely sweetly right now. I hate to mess with anything.

It isn't possible to somehow damage anything (like say the motherboard) or mess up something in the BIOS by continuing to attempt to install a bad hard drive is it? I suppose not, or I'd have done so by now. I'm just paranoid. Or more likely, I'm just tired of looking at the stupid thing.

In the past, Maxtor has only asked for the serial number of the drive. They know when the drive was made, and pretty much to what extent it is still covered under warranty. I haven't bought from them in years, though. It used to be that if the drive was no longer in production, they would offer an upgrade path for a nominal fee.

Giles Habibula wrote:The problem is I bought the drive on sale in October of 2003,

That could be the biggest gotcha. I thought the hard drive companies scaled back the manufacturers' warranties to 12 months, but I may be mistaken. I know WD was offering 3-year warranties for a while.

Jeff's right that they're really only going to care about the serial number ( available on the white label on the end of the drive). Can't hurt to call.

They're *NOT* going to like the sounds of you scratching up the side of the drive, however. That's a HUGE non-op shock risk to the drives, and I'd be surprised to hear that you *didn't* cause your own troubles there. Shock/vibration-wise, hard drives are pretty sensitive beasties.

Continued luck,
~Neal

The Meal wrote:
They're *NOT* going to like the sounds of you scratching up the side of the drive, however. That's a HUGE non-op shock risk to the drives, and I'd be surprised to hear that you *didn't* cause your own troubles there. Shock/vibration-wise, hard drives are pretty sensitive beasties.

Continued luck,
~Neal

If it makes any difference, I scratched it while pushing it into the slot. It was a pretty tight fit. Looking at it here now, it's not a bad scratch. It's about 2 inches long and just scratched the black-painted side. I didn't drop it or jolt it or otherwise abuse it. I just pushed it into place and that's what happened. Though I realize you're not the one I need to convince.

I'm gonna try and install it again. And if that doesn't work, like you said, it won't hurt to make a phone call.

Giles Habibula wrote:If it makes any difference, I scratched it while pushing it into the slot. It was a pretty tight fit. Looking at it here now, it's not a bad scratch. It's about 2 inches long and just scratched the black-painted side. I didn't drop it or jolt it or otherwise abuse it. I just pushed it into place and that's what happened. Though I realize you're not the one I need to convince.

I know that scratch. I've done it to drives myself. And during that sort of a scratch/gouge (certain case manufacturers really have some wonky systems for mounting drives), I've measured induced vibrations on the drive. And afterwards I've checked for functionality.

Scratches = bad. They put higher-frequency energy into the drive that can really cause mechanical problems. "But it's just a scratch!" doesn't indicate nothing's wrong with a hard drive. Hopefully in your case there was a driver mismatch, but scraping through the black e-coat and into the aluminum basecasting is pretty bad juju for a drive.

Best of luck!
~Neal

UPDATE!

I installed that 160 Maxtor as a slave, and the damn thing works now!

Thing is, it was that damn 137 gig limit. I could never have gotten it working as a primary master C drive, because I needed to use the MaxBlast CD to install it, and that only works in Windows.

MaxBlast detected the drive, but told me that even though Windows SP2 supported the drive, MaxBlast needed to edit my registry to enable the drive. So I clicked okay and it did it, rebooted, then partitioned and formatted the drive with no trouble!

All is well.

I now have way more storage than I need (120 + 160 = 280 gigs), but hey, at least I won't have to worry about that!

Thanks everyone!

EDIT: Nevermind all that. It's doin' the same old shit again suddenly.
Pulled it out of there. The hell with it. If I need more space later I'll just buy another drive.