Hdd identified wrong: K7S5A & Maxtor 80G. Won't boot (sometimes).

[Chuckiechan]

Sometimes when I boot up (cold) the AM I stall at the black screen after POST, "Boot record OK".

When I re boot, in the POST screen, it shows HDD #1 (Master) as a brand I've never heard of. HDD # 2 (Secondary) is identified ok, as are the CD Roms.

I went into bios and did F3 for re detect, and it is ok now. This has happened before.

My question is, is it the Maxtor HDD or the BIOS?

I'm getting paranoid here!

Thanks in advance...

[Bill in SD, CA]

More likely BIOS related IMO.

Checked the CMOS battery?

Bill

[Bovon]

#1.. I don't have a clue
#2.. I'll speculate..at least until somebody that does have a clue drops by.

If the BIOS is correctly ID'ing everything else, it sounds like the data stored on the Maxtor drive is partially corrupt.
When the BIOS wrongly ID's the drive, does it continue to boot?.. if so, get a diagnostics application like AIDA or Sisoft Sandra and once in Windows..run that to see what is reported with a different "reader"
Write Maxtor..tell them what is happening and see if they have any thing to say.
Remember..we are dealing with a bunch of 0's and 1's in the binary code that is written into these chips..this is usually done by a glob of transistors that handle either a 1 or a 0..if all 1's and all 0's fall exactly right..we get the proper wording. Let one transistor fail, and we get a 0 where a 1 should be..then we will get anything else...rather than what it should be.

(Well...Bill beat me to posting...maybe I should just wait until everybody else takes a crack at a thread..huh). LOL...

[Chuckiechan]

I'm going to change the battery, and double check the cables while I'm in there. I downloaded a Maxblast 3 that has some diagnostics, so I'll try that.