Maxtor drive

[Brian Witowski]

I didn't see the original problem with the Maxtor drive so I'll throw this out 
there.  If it doesn't apply, then ignore it.

I had a PC a couple weeks ago that was returning CRC errors in my diag. 
software, for the hard drive.  I don't recall the motherboard but I opted to 
replace the HD.  It was used for business and I didn't see any point in 
taking chances.  

I did a full scandisk, repaired errors, put in a new Maxtor 20 GB drive and 
did a Ghost.  I have used Ghost for local drive imaging for 3 or 4 years and 
have never had a failure.  The copy went off without a hitch.  I pulled the 
old drive, set the new drive as master and rebooted.  Went into CMOS and 
detected the drive.  No problems.  Rebooted.  It stopped at the 'Updating DMI 
Pool Data' message.  Just stayed there forever.  After trying everything 
under the sun I did a little test.  I fdisk'd the drive with MS fdisk (my 
first mistake), deleted all partitions, rebooted, created a 500MB partition, 
formatted with the /s option and rebooted.  Same thing!  Now I was stumped.  
The system properly recognized the drive, I was able to format it and could 
even access it through Windows98 if I booted to the original drive.

To cut to the chase, the MBR was whacked.  I did 'fdisk /mbr' and it booted.  
I didn't try to Ghost to another brand HD but I would like to know if this 
was a maxtor issue or if Ghost somehow didnt transfer the MBR properly.  

Brian