So if I understand correctly. The old Seagate is dead. You pulled a working Maxtor out of another machine, and put it into this one.
And now it doesn't boot, giving a "Invalid system disc" error.

Is the BIOS set to auto-detect the new drive's properties? Or are they entered manually?
If entered manually, maybe the values for the old Seagate (Head, Cylinders, etc.) are still there, but are not compatible with the new Maxtor?

Just popped in the old Seagate back in and for some reason it works again.

a seagate which got hit by a truck at top speed is a better hard drive than any maxtor ever produced 🤣
/justtrolling

nemail wrote:

a seagate which got hit by a truck at top speed is a better hard drive than any maxtor ever produced 🤣
/justtrolling

I also thought that - than I got stuck with four seagate DEAD 1TB 7200.11 drives and 380$ in the shitter. Never buying seagate again. The only maxtor drive that ever died on me is an old D740-6L Quantum Fireball Re-brand. And it died after nearly 8 years of service and 3-4 years of storage. The new seagates I spent a small fortune (for me at least) died in succession over a 1 month period. Old seagate drives are bulletproof. I have a 1,6GB drive in my 486 - beaten and battered, poorly stored over the years (was in a hardware pile in my attic - had bird poop on the electronics board) but works beautifully - same thing for the 20GB drive in my slot 1 rig.

P.S. - Seagate customer support was horrible during the 7200.11 incident - but I had some recent dealings with them, and things seem to have changed (for the better).

(Deleted. No longer relevant anyway)

I've also tried an old Western Digital Hard Drive and while half the time auto detect would detect the settings correctly, in the end it would say "Primary Master Hard Disk fail" in the startup BIOS Screen like in here

EZ-Bios is from maxblast boot disk, it's installs some sort of translation software on the mbr so that your system can access larger drives than it normally could, I use it on a 486.

The EZ-Bios should give you the option to boot from the floppy disk, press A then press enter to boot from a floppy after the ez-bios has loaded. From there you can install software/fdisk it.

If your computer doesn't need ez-bios because it can work with drives over 528MB boot from a CD or or floppy and use fdisk with the /mbr to remove ez-bios. I'm not certain if this will reset the disk back to normal, you might need to use maxblast boot disk to remove the ezbios if fdisk /mbr doesn't work.

I'll try to give it one more try
I'll post back if it works

TandySensation wrote:

EZ-Bios is from maxblast boot disk, it's installs some sort of translation software on the mbr so that your system can access larger drives than it normally could, I use it on a 486.

The EZ-Bios should give you the option to boot from the floppy disk, press A then press enter to boot from a floppy after the ez-bios has loaded. From there you can install software/fdisk it.

If your computer doesn't need ez-bios because it can work with drives over 528MB boot from a CD or or floppy and use fdisk with the /mbr to remove ez-bios. I'm not certain if this will reset the disk back to normal, you might need to use maxblast boot disk to remove the ezbios if fdisk /mbr doesn't work.