[Paperinik]

I found this thread googling for the solution to the same problem.
I got the same controller, si-3112 version 0002 with driver v. 1.0.0.50
and just one hard disk, a Maxtor 6B200M0 (firmware BANC1BY0) attached to
it. My system disk is an old maxtor 6L040J2 (40 GB) attached to the
motherboard's ATA133 controller. The motherboard is an ECS K7VTA3 V5.0
based on the VIA KT333 chipset (VT8235 southbridge). My os is Windows
XP Pro SP2.
I get the same error trying to format the sata Maxtor drive using the
disk management function of the computer management console: "The
format did not complete successfully". Same using the format command.
I managed to format the drive using partition magic, but when I tried
to use it I found out that the file system soon became corrupted after
normal use, and chkdsk.exe couldn't correct the errors because of "not
enough space on disk", while the drive was almost empty.
I had an occasion to try the hard drive on a different controller, to
be precise the Via controller embedded in the southbridge of a kt880
based mainboard and the drive seemed to work well. Unfortunately I had
only a few hours to test the system before removing the hard drive,
because the computer wasn't mine, but during that time, as I said,
everything seemed to work well.
This fact together with the fact that someone else experiences the same
problem (which makes it reproducible) pushes me to think that controller
and hard disk are for some reason incompatible.
But I would like to hear someone more technically trained on this
subject, so I will send an email to Maxtor's customer's support, hoping
they will answer.
I would also like to include a link to this thread in the mail, so let
me know if you have anything against this.


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Paperinik
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[gdeltreve]

Last week I had eactly the same problems with the Maxtor 6B200M0 drive.
Tried to build a RAID-5 with 4 drives on Silicon Imahge 3114, on the
nVidia nForce4 and on a Promise Fasttrak SX4-M, but nothing worked.
I suspected the drive from the beginning, because in another setup a
Raid-2 with Maxtor 6*L*200M0 worked fine. I swapped the whole lot for
new 6L's and Presto!, everything works like a dream.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the 6B series!!!!


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gdeltreve
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[cybernegy]

I had the same problem with a 80gb Seagate Barracuda drive. I think it
is a compatibility issue with xp and the sil 3112 pci card. I managed
to format the drive by having a program that came with an old sataraid
driver sitting in memory. The version of that driver is 1.0.0.19.
However, now that it is formatted I cant really do anything with it
without getting constant corruption errors. chkdsk will fix the error
and allow me to get back into the harddrive and copy files and such,
but I have to run chkdsk all the time on the drive to use it. I
basically can only use the drive as storage, and I am nervous doing
that. I have to run chkdsk once or twice to be able to access my files
on it.

Has anyone found a solution to these problems?


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cybernegy
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[Lucas Partridge]

Well I finally managed to get the 6B200MO Maxtor drive formatted in
Windows XP (hooray!!!). I did this by removing the old SATA RAID
controller and putting in a different one instead.

The original controller that didn't work was this one from eBuyer:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=7838083095&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=48670
One of the customer reviews pointed to the manufacturer's description of
this card:
http://www.syba.com/us/en/product/43/02/03/index.html
I was using the model SD-SATA150R which has the RAID option.
The driver was downloaded from MS Windows Update, v1.0.0.51, dated
27/08/2004.

I got the new card from Maplin Electronics:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=36702&TabID=1&source=12&doy=30m5
The website doesn't specify the make and model of the card, so it was a
gamble that it would work. To my horror, when I got it out of the box I
saw that like the previous card it was using a Silicon Image Sil 3112
chipset! However it was a later version, v1.21 instead of v1.1 on the
old card. The new card came with driver v1.0.0.33 on CD so I chose to
stick with the v1.0.0.51 I already had on Windows.

I removed the old card, put the new one in and booted the machine into
Windows XP no problems. Then I shut the system down, connected up the
Maxtor drive to the primary channel of the new card and rebooted.
Finally I did a quick NTFS format of the new drive in Windows XP: Format
completed - yippee! I've had no problems with the new drive since.

So either the original card make/model is completely incompatible with
the 6B200MO Maxtor drive (but only in Windows XP, because it worked fine
in Windows ME!); or my particular copy of that card was bust. Either way
I would advise against getting that model card if you want to use the
6B200MO Maxtor drive in WinXP.

(Note that I only have one SATA drive and did not make a RAID set. The
SATA drive is also only used for storage; I boot from a separate Western
Digital IDE drive.)

Thanks for all your help everyone, especially to "Paperinik" for
suggesting I switch the controller rather than the drive.