defragging new Maxtor HD

[blacktooth]

I just purchased a new 40 Gb Maxtor Diamondmax Plus. Everything installed all right, but now after getting all of my programs installed, I want to defrag the drive. The Windows 98 defrag program gives me a message saying that there is an error on the drive. Scandisk says that the drive is good. I did use Maxtor's program to do the initial format of the drive. Could this be the problem? And is it possible to use a Windows boot disk to reformat a drive that was formatted using the Maxtor software?

[Blakhart]

It (maxtor drive ute) may have added info/partitions/whatever to the drive that 98 doesn't like. I would do the quick erase of the drive using the maxtor drive utility and reinstall, unless you are ok with it the way it is. Then on reinstall I would let windows part and format the drive.

I am all about the nuke and pave.

[glc]

If your computer has a 8 or 32 gig bios limitation, using the Maxtor utility to install the drive installed "EZ-Bios" which can be the source of a lot of problems. This sounds a bit drastic, but to pin this down you need to use Maxtor Powermax to "zero wipe" the drive and put it back to factory fresh condition. Then you can boot with a 98 bootdisk and run Fdisk. If it doesn't show at least 38 gb available for a partition, you have a bios issue, you will probably see either 8gb or 32 gb available. There are 4 ways to overcome this, listed in order of desiarability:

1. See if your motherboard manufacturer has a bios flash update to take care of a large hard drive issue.

2. Use a PCI controller card with its own bios (such as a Promise Ultra 100/133)

3. If it shows 32gb available, just create a partition to use 100% and forget about the lost 8 gb.

3. Use Maxblast and install EZ-Bios (ugh).