Hi,

I bought a Romtec Trios, and attached three 80GB IDE Maxtor hard drives to it. After I partittioned and formateded the hard drives, and then I start to install Windows ME. While Windows ME is installing, it stops and shows a message something like this "Disk error....Want to retry?" Out of three hard drives, only one hard drive attached to the second switch is working. All hard drives are set as CS(Cable Select). I have also tried to set all hard drives to Master, but the same problem happened.
For Windows XP, the Romtec Trios has no problem with it. Since the BIOS of my motherboard is Phoneix, which is supported by Romtec Trios device. Any suggestion on how to fix this problem? Thank you very much.

At what point in the WinME install do you see the error message? Does it happen right away, not until you forst boot to the Windows desktop, or at some other time? If it happens at the same point in the installation every time, that could provide a clue as to what is causing the problem; if it fails at a different point each time, that could be another clue. Details can be essential in solving this, so take good notes and we should be able to help you accomplish this.

Set ALL of the drives as MASTER; do NOT use the Cable Select setting with the Trios. Since you seem to have identical Maxtor drives, attach only ONE drive to the Romtec with the IDE and power cables, then try to do a fresh install of WinME on that drive. If you get it installed properly, you can add another HDD and install a different OS on it, but be SURE to physically disconnect the other harddrives when you do this; that way, you should be able to avoid conflicts or confusion about which drive you're working with. When all the drives have an OS installed, you can reconnect everything to the Trios and use it to select the boot drive.

Lastly, if you see an error message while installing WinME or ANY operating system, copy it down EXACTLY and post it here, so we can try to provide some specific advice on how to correct the problem. The information you've provided about that "Disk error" really isn't very helpful; again, the details are important, so write down any error messages and research them with Google or post them here...

Good luck; let us know how this turns out...

Thank you so much kronk. I will try again and post the detail of the error message.

Here is the error that I got after I chose "Exit" screen and it starts loading something. Then the error occurs. "ATTENTION: A serious disk error has occurred while writing to drive C.
Retry (r)?"

I actually have a few Romtec Trios devices and I installed them into a few computer systems. On some computer systems, Windows ME can install up to 13%, but on some other systems are over 13% and then they also stop and display the above error message.

Since I partitioned the 80GB hard drive into 5 partitions. The drive C is about 15000MB, 15000MB, 20000MB, 20000MB, and the remaining. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thank you so much

That disk error message is a strong indication of a serious problem with the drive; it seems to me that the best approach will be to wipe everything off the drive and start over with the installation. In order to wipe the drive clean, you should download the PowerMax utility from Maxtor and use it to do a complete low-level format of the harddrive you want to install WinME on. Only by doing a low-level format can you be sure that ALL existing data on the drive will be overwritten; you can download PowerMax from this link:

http://tinyurl.com/qmmlj

Follow the instructions on that page to create the PowerMax boot disk, then boot the system with it, and do a FULL low-level format of the drive. Once the low-level format finishes (which will take several HOURS, so plan accordingly), you can use MaxBlast4 (which you should already have on a floppy disk) to repartition and reformat the harddrive. This is time-consuming, but it is the only way to be POSITIVE that your drives are CLEAN, with no corrupted data or damaged partitions on them.

In case you DON'T already have MaxBlast4, you can download it from this link:

http://tinyurl.com/mhbbh

Just follow the directions on that page to create a new MaxBlast diskette; PowerMax will wipe the drive clean, while MaxBlast will create the new partitions and format the drive.

Once you've got the drive clean, partitioned, and formatted, you should be able to install WinME without any problems. Let me advise you NOT to use any of the MS-DOS tools (FDISK, FORMAT, etc.) to do this work. The MS-DOS utilities are crude and primitive; if you want to do this with the best chance of success, use the Maxtor utilities I've recommended here. PowerMax and MaxBlast4 are among the best utilities in a technician's toolbox, and learning how to use them now can help you if you have problems in the future.

The rest of this is up to you now; I've successfully cleaned countless drives over the years with the Maxtor utilities, and they give you the best chance of completing the OS installation, provided you perform the low-level format with PowerMax and follow that with new partitions created by MaxBlast. I can't make you do this; you might not want to invest so much time in this, but from my perspective, you've encountered some serious problems, and only tools designed to restore the drive to as-new conditions can help you now.

Good luck with this; please let us know what you decide to do. Feel free to post any questions you might have; I'll do my best to answer them for you.

Thank you kronk for your advices.
First, those Maxtor hard drives that I tried are NEW(brand new). Second, I can installed Windows XP Pro on those hard drives without any problems. As I mentioned before, I have many computer systems with the Romtec Trios devices installed, and only those hard drives attached to the "second" switch of the Romtec Trios are working. However, there is one computer system, it also works with the hard drive attached to the "first" switch, so I have no idea why that one works, but not the others. Any idea or suggestion?

Thank you so much for your advices.