Maxtor Shared Storage reformatiing woes.

[velocityg4]

I have a Maxtor Shared Storage (not Plus or II). Which I am having trouble reformatting and maintaining it's full capacity.

It is a 200GB hard drive but Windows insists it is a 128GB while Mac OS X and Ubuntu insist it is only 137GB. This is on four different computers all less than 4 years old with 48Bit LBA support (Macbook via USB adapter, nVidia nForce 250, Intel ICH7R, Intel ICH9). I get the same results whether using the on board IDE controllers, external drive case, SYBA IDE RAID PCI Card or USB ATA adapter. OS's used are Windows 7, Windows 7 RC, Windows XP Pro SP3, Mac OS X 10.6 and Ubuntu 9.04.

Now when viewed in Windows disk management it does list the storage partition as 189GB however once I delete the ReiserFS partitions any OS insists the drive is limited to 128GB or 137GB.

History

This drive needed data recovery performed as the owner accidentally deleted their files without having backups. Since the Maxtor Shared Storage used the ReiserFS file system and a Broadcom Partition Table as opposed to MBR, GUID or Apple. I had to hex edit Sector 0 to a readable Map (MBR).

However in the process of recovery I had to also use reiserfsck to repair the Superblock and partition table to make the partition mountable in Ubuntu forever making the drive unusable in the Maxtor Shared Storage enclosure.

Now I am trying to reformat the hard drive as NTFS and dump the recovery I made onto the drive for them to stick inside their computer. If no solution is available I will just format to 137GB and leave it at that.

The only conclusions I have come to is that either the drive is actually a smaller drive and Maxtor used compression in the shared storage. Or Maxtor tweaked the drives firmware to prevent people from sticking the drive into a computer if the Shared Storage's network board failed. By making the board itself only support 40bit LBA.

I have looked to see if there are firmware updates but none are available. I also have concerns that the contoller board has some tweaks to prevent flashing to a normal firmware, rather resulting in a flash failure hosing the drive.

The actual drive is a
Maxtor Diamond Max 10
200GB PATA133 HDD
LBA: 398297088

 

[Makosuke]

Sounds kinda like the drive has a capacity clip enabled to keep it under 137GB. Could certainly be a firmware issue given where the drive came from, but you didn't mention how the jumpers are set; I think the only capacity clip jumper on Diamondmax 10 drives is 32GB, not 128GB (or whatever), but maybe there's something undocumented. Did you change the jumper settings when you put it in a computer?

 

[velocityg4]

Sounds kinda like the drive has a capacity clip enabled to keep it under 137GB. Could certainly be a firmware issue given where the drive came from, but you didn't mention how the jumpers are set; I think the only capacity clip jumper on Diamondmax 10 drives is 32GB, not 128GB (or whatever), but maybe there's something undocumented. Did you change the jumper settings when you put it in a computer?

Just set for Master (Slave and Cable Select make no difference which they shouldn't). If I enable the capacity jumper it drops to 32GB.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, that was the only useful suggestion I have. Weird problem, though.

I do think that if the drive is labeled as a 200GB drive it really is; that sort of system-level compression trickery isn't usually done, and I don't think they'd label the drive incorrectly even if it was doing low-level compression.

Have you tried downloading whatever low-level drive testing/firmware adjusting software Maxtor has/had? Occasionally there are things you can adjust with those that you can't get to any other way--I had some Samsung drives that wouldn't automatically select the correct ATA level (I think they defaulted to ATA/100 and the computer only supported ATA/33), and I was having all sorts of weird problems on an older computer until I realized this and manually switched it using their tool.

Edit: Looks like Maxtor's old PowerMax functionality has been rolled into Seatools, so that would be the utility I'm talking about. No idea if there are any settings that PowerMax might have for a drive that old that Seatools doesn't, not having ever used the former.

 

[velocityg4]

Thanks anyway. I don't have time to fiddle with this anymore and will be returning the drive with less that optimal capacity and recovered data.