Some folks at Hard Forum think the issue is that Newegg (where I buy my drives) doesn't pack them properly. Get them from ZipZoomFly or Hypermicro is the recommendation. Sage words about packing, maybe that's why so many of my drives fail?
DFI Street reports that it is a problem with the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB, you have to update the firmware. This is done by calling Maxtor and then they will give you a program that you boot and it flashes the drive an it ain't easy as you can see below. Maybe this will fix all my Chaintech and my DFI problems with this drive.
The net is that the newer firmware release E00 appears to fix these problems, but you have to talk with Maxtor to get it.
They confirmed that there was an issue with a few newer Maxtor SATA drives and a few newer motherboards. They said it was a "slight incompatibility", rather than a problem... but they said it COULD be fixed with firmware updates. They had me download 2 firmware updates. I had to flash to one, then reboot... then flash to the second one (it wasn't possible to to straight to the second one). The process wasn't very smooth. At first, they gave me one that wouldn't flash at all... then I got one that said flash mismatch.... Anyways, finally I got both firmwares to update. I turned my computer on and it actually booted up (and fast) without a BSOD (which it had been getting). I have continued to run it for a while and all seems to be well. So hopefully all is good. I will know for sure by the end of the weekend (I plan on running her hard )... Both techs told me to see how it went and let them know... BTW, my original firmware verison was BANC1B70, I then flashed to BANC1BY0, and then finally to BANC1E00. The boot disk their utility created didn't exactly run properly. I have to boot from a Win98 floppy and look at the switches on their .exe file... but in the end, it appears all went well. Hopefully the process will be simplified soon... I am not sure about posting the firmwares and instructions here... it sounded as if you had to have EXACT firmware upgrades for the version you currently have
