Gripes about Maxtor Software

Once upon a time (October 2003) I was disposing of an old computer, a Compaq Presario CDS 924. It was running Windows 95 and had 8 MB of RAM. The hard disk was a 540 MB Quantum Maverick. Since the machine was made, Maxtor bought out Quantum (or at least their hard disk business), so I went to the Maxtor web site to get software that would do a low-level format of the drive. This wipes out all traces of all the files. They have two programs that do low level drive formats and both failed to work. Both are DOS programs that run from bootable floppy disks.

Powermax

October 30, 2003. I tried to run Powermax version 4.06 (currently the latest version, dated June 2, 2003) but could not. The first screen the program displays says to hit the F8 key. That worked. Then there is another screen that also requires you to hit the F8 to actually run the program. After hitting F8 this second time, the program shut down. It returned me to the A:\ prompt and issued no error message.

The Maxtor web site says "The POWERMAX.EXE utility is effective on all Maxtor or Quantum ATA (IDE) hard drives with a capacity greater than or equal to 500 MB." Not true.

I understand Powermax did not work for this drive. I would try one other alternative for running Powermax: Find a Windows 95 startup diskette. Boot to this startup diskette. Once you get to an A prompt remove the startup diskette and insert the diskette containing Powermax. At the A prompt, type in Powermax. This may get the utility to run for you. There is also a chance that the hard drive is too old to be recognized by Powermax. In this case we would not have a diagnostic utility that will run on this drive.

I tried their suggestion with a Windows 98 startup disk, but it made no difference (I don't have a Windows 95 startup disk). Powermax still returns to the A:\ prompt after pressing F8 to run the program. Another email to Maxtor produced this response:

It may be that Powermax is not detecting the Maxtor drive. If the Maxtor drive is very very old, it may not detect the drive. Another possibility is if you are using the NVidia chipset, the Powermax program will probably not detect the drive in that instance either.The only other option we have to Low Level Format our drive is to use our Maxblast utility. Maxblast has a Low Level Format utility on the Utility menu.

MaxBlast 3

Next, I downloaded and ran MaxBlast version 3.6. It started to run but then also shut itself down. The last thing it said was "thank you for using maxblast 3". Then it dumped me at a D:\> prompt. The D disk was a ram drive it had made.

FYI

The Quantum disk is model 540A. It has a 96KB cache and the serial number is 428232140. The micro code level is A06.05. The write cache is disabled. Read look-ahead is disabled. Auto-reassign is disabled. This information is from the IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test utility, not from any Maxtor software.

I wiped the hard disk clean with Darik's Boot and Nuke, a free program that runs off a boot floppy disk It supports multiple hard disk wiping methods including one endorsed by the Department of Defense which entails seven passes.