I have a Maxtor 83500D4 hard drive well thats it's serial number anyway, it has a capacity of 3,339Mb. I have been having problems with it for a while now with fat & fat32. Anyway recently I decided it was time for me to fix it because it is better than a drive in another computer I have but the jumper settings are giving me greif. (Well I think thats what the problem is anyway.) I went to the Maxtor site but the settings they are giving me dont seem to even be for my drive because the diagram uses a pin that dosent even exsist on my drive, and the sticker on the drive its self are different to the settings on the site I tried the settings on the drive sticker but I get the same error with every setting I use. I am trying to use a formating program called wipeout the error message I get is "cant read boot sector" or something like that, there never seems to be any activity from the drive except from it spinning. I have also checked the bios and it has identified the drive correctly. I can send you pictures of what i am talking about via E-mail. Any ideas? Thanks

when i get a drive in that the jumper settings are not defined, i just pull all jumpers off the drive ,and let it default to master. if the drive is to be a slave drive, then just experiment with the jumpers until the drive is seen as a slave.

Does this help: http://www.techadvice.com/info/answer.asp?aid=382 Basically, if j50 is jumpered, it's set for master. If j48 is jumpered, it's set for cable select. If nothing is jumpered, it's set for slave. The horizontal jumpers are spares and don't count in drive configuration. They can be removed and have no effect on configuration.

Thanks for the help everyone, Hey DAVEINCAPS, the site you gave me had the right Master setting but the other settings still use the pin that dosent exsist, the settings you told me I think are the correct ones. I have the right settings for it now but the only thing that seems to be able to use the drive is is powermax. When I go into fdisk it tells me to insert a disk so I do but it dosent even look at the disk drive or the hard drive and just comes up with another error. Could this be caused by my Zip drive? I dont see why fdisk would tell me to inset a disk anyway. Thanks.

If the zip drive is on the same cable as the HD you might want to temporarily disconnect it to see if that's the problem. Some drives had a cylinder limiting jumper for old bios' that couldn't recognize the entire capacity. That may be what that extra one is for. All the maxtor drives I've worked with work OK with just the jumper settings in the previous post. I don't know why fdisk would give that message either. But try disconnecting the zip drive and see if that makes a difference.

No that hasnt seemed to make a difference. sorry it took so long to answer been busy. I formatted the drive with powermax but still no other programs see it, could it be fat/fat32 problems? Thanks.

No, I don't think so. 98 will recognize both FAT (FAT16) and FAT32. I don't know if this is practical, but you may want to disconnect all the IDE devices except that particular HD. Set it as primary master and make sure it's configured right in cmos. Also make sure A: is the first boot device in cmos. Then boot from a regular 98 bootdisk, run fdisk and remove whatever partitions are on it. Reboot, run fdisk again to create the partition. Then reboot again and format it. Then reconnect the other drives. At least that way you'll know there's no interference with other drives.