Success!!!

[Sylvander]

See http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=40564

I've got my HDD working on the IDE [RAID] Controller Card. :)
AND the card [and so everything else] is now seeing the full 80 GB capacity instead of the incorrect 32 GB partial capacity that was seen previously. :D :cool:

1. I had asked Maxtor for instructions on how to do this [I was pretty sure it must be possible], but instead they told me the drive was faulty and should be returned to the factory in Ireland [I'm in Scotland].
WHY DID THEY DO THAT? :( :mad:

2. I asked for advice here at the PC Guide and got NOT A SINGLE REPLY.
So I was on my own and just had to rely on cunning/kenning.

HOW I DID IT
a. Used "MaxBlast 4" to zero-fill the drive [don't know if that was the 32 GB seen, or all of the 80 GB].
b. Tried to use MaxBlast to "Set Drive Size" with the drive still connected to the controller card, but the prog reported that this didn't need to be done because the drive was connected to a controller card.
c. Restarted the PC | entered the BIOS Setup | re-enabled the Primary IDE Controller and set the Primary Master to "None". This apparently means the drive will be under the controller's control, but not under the addressing control of the BIOS, so the whole drive will be seen by MaxBlast. [Don't understand that exactly but the MaxBlast help files gave instructions to do that.]
d. Shut down, powered off, switched the HDD IDE cable connection from the card to the on-board IDE Controller.
e. Restarted the PC | ran MaxBlast | Utilities | "Set Hard Drive Size".
The "Native LBA" = 160,086,528 was already selected, so I gave that the ok.
f. Exit from MaxBlast and Powered off.
g. Re-started the PC and booted to MaxBlast.
h. MaxBlast said it had detected the HDD and did I want to set it up for use.
Said yes to that and made custom Partitions [all 80 GB was being seen].
Five Partitions totalled 81,943 MB [the controller reports 78,167 MB].
i. I'd made "Simple Backups" to CD-RW's just prior to doing this, and they were easy to restore, so I was back up and running in no time once the drive was partitioned.

[jlreich]

Good to hear you got it figured out. It's been a long time coming hasn't it. Have you tried EBCD yet? Shouldn't be problem now. :)

[Sylvander]

"Good to hear you got it figured out"
Perhaps we shouldn't speak too soon.
I can see all of the 80 GB and there's no DDO banner loading, but when I tested "Partition Magic" [loading from my customised EBCD] it reported "Disk Manager has been detected on drive 0, but...is not running", and PM wouldn't work.
Looks like I'll need to re-zero-fill [using something OTHER than MaxBlast ("Wipe" I think)], the re-partition using "fdisk" and format using the "format" command.

"It's been a long time coming hasn't it"
Certainly has...but there's no hurry about this. I'd rather it went smoothly and slowly than end up with some disaster.

"Have you tried EBCD yet?"
Eh!?
I think I was the one, years back, who first mentioned EBCD here at the PC Guide. I made an EBCD disk waaaayy back then, but didn't know how to make use of it, so it sat in the rack doing nothing.
Paul Komski helped show me that if I used "Smart Boot Manager" after the DDO banner, then the EBCD could access my HDD. So I've been using the EBCD before installing the controller card.

"Shouldn't be problem now"
The use of a controller card won't make any difference to the use of the EBCD [not so far as I know].
I'm hoping it will allow me the use of Partition Magic and Drive Image, but it looks like I'll need to redo the zero fill, repartition, reformat, restore the backups. I'll do that now.

[Paul Komski]

This apparently means the drive will be under the controller's control, but not under the addressing control of the BIOS, so the whole drive will be seen by MaxBlast.
The PCI card makes the interface behave in SCSI fashion. For bootabiliy reasons it has generally always been best to not mix on board ATA and any SCSI devices. The addressing capabilities of the controller are what allow it to read the full capacity of any drives on it; the controller's BIOS are thus fully LBA enabled (depending of course on the age and BIOS of the controller card).

Scrubbing the DDO (not sure what it means that it is present but not functional) is what I have always found difficult. PTedit or PartInfo (run them from a DOS floppy) from ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/ might give a handle on what is going on or might not.

I suspect that PTedit may show a very small primary partiton at the start of the drive (the pointers to the DDO) but that you may then not be able to edit it with PTedit. That was my last experience but if PTedit can zero that first partition in particular then you should be in business. If you can set all the PTedit entries to 0 then you have effectively deleted all partitions and "scrubbed your drive" without using a wipe utility; it is my own quick way of "zeroing a drive" when fdisk has any problems with non-dos partitions. Better still is to zero the whole of the mbr which is what a lot of quicky zeroers do. Then fdisk ... etc.

[Sylvander]

Job done. :)
Used "Wipe" to zero-fill, "fdisk" to partition, "Format" to format the partitions.
Restored the backups, came into Windows to check all was well.
Restarted | booted to customised EBCD | ran "Partition Magic" and it appears to now be working ok.
Shut down and booted to "ptedit" and got:

_Type_Boot_Cyl_Head_Sect__Cylinder__Head_Sect___Be fore_____Sectors__
1_0B___80___0___1____1_____382_____254__63_____63_ _______6,152,832
2_0F___00__383__0____1____1022_____254__63___6,152 ,895__153,918,765
3_all zero's
4_all zero's

(A)"not sure what it means that it is present but not functional"
Seems to me that Maxtor puts "something" on the HDD even if it doesn't actually go so far as to install the DDO, and that "something" is being detected by "Partition Magic" as though it were a DDO, but it cannot see it running.

(B) "Scrubbing the DDO...is what I have always found difficult"
Zero-filling the drive eliminates it [I find in practice].
But when I used "MaxBlast 4" to re-partition & re-format the drive Maxtor puts "something" on the HDD. Using programs other than MaxBlast doesn't produce this problem. That's how I eliminated it.

[Sylvander]

"Drive Image" now works, whereas it didn't when the DDO was installed. :D

I notice that there is no mouse functionality when "ptedit" is running. :confused:
Is there a way to fix that?

[Sylvander]

Forgot to say that at the end of "f" [see above] and before "g" I switched the HDD IDE connection from the on-board controller to the new controller card.
The drive was partitioned and formatted whilst connected to the new card.

[Paul Komski]

I notice that there is no mouse functionality when "ptedit" is running.
If you didn't start a mouse then you wont have one under dos. You can use mouse.com that comes with Partiton Magic and would be on its boot floppies and on EBCD if memory serves or any other dos mouse program. Just run mouse before you run ptedit or run mouse from an entry in an autoexec.bat file.

"not sure what it means that it is present but not functional"If you had run ptedit before wiping the drive then I think you would have seen its presence as a small special partition. That, at least, has been my own past experience. The mbr would have been non-standard and could have been made to have pointed to this "special partiton"; a partition (if one can call it that) just occupying a few sectors. Wiping would have cleaned it off once the ddo was non functional - if the ddo was functional the disk would only have been wiped from the end of this "special partition".

Zero-filling the drive eliminates it [I find in practice].Theoretically maybe but not in practice. I tried wiping a ddo covered drive with 5 different utilities before I found a DOS-based forensic program that ignored the DDO and then cleaned the drive. The 5 other utilities might say they were wiping but when one re-examined the drive nothing had been written to the first few sectors - there were as it were write-protected by the protected bios data copied to RAM.

Good that you finally managed to eliminate it from your HDD.

[Sylvander]

"run mouse from an entry in an autoexec.bat file"
I know it's probably very simple, but I don't know the necessary command line.
I don't want to guess at it; could you oblige by giving me the line?
"Mouse.com" is now on the floppy.

EDIT
I just restarted | booted to the "ptedit" floppy |
Ran:
a:\>mouse
then:
a:\>ptedit
and was pleased and surprised to see the mouse cursor.
BRILLIANT! :D

[Paul Komski]

For autoexec bat just two one-word lines (assumes both files are in the root of the floppy). Use just mouse if you dont want the autoexec to fire up ptedit immediately.

mouse
ptedit

[Sylvander]

Job done.
I wish everything was that easy.

Thank you once again for your help Paul, it's much appreciated. :D