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Large HD with SS7 board hanging issues

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First post, by senrew

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I've got an AOpen AX59-Pro SS7 board with a 30gb Maxtor drive connected to it. Occasionally, when doing a DIR or whatnot in DOS, the whole damn thing will hang. Someone here suggested that maybe it had something to do with the board not completely supporting the drive.

The board is a MVP3 chipset with the VIA VT82C596B southbridge. Not sure if that helps to ID the controller built in, but it's what I could find. The drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 30gb, 7200 RPM, Ultra ATA/133.

I don't really NEED a large drive on this machine. It's running pure DOS 7 from a stripped-down-to-DOS-only win98se install specifically for the fat32 usage. At the moment I'm using less than 800mb for everything I've already got installed.

So, what are my options?

Should I just find a nice older ~8gig drive and be done or can I keep the larger drive with a newer PCI controller card? Any other workarounds?

Reply 1 of 2, by noshutdown

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the via 596b southbridge shall not have any problem with 30gb harddrive at all, after updating bios it can even support harddrives up to 127gb.
so i suggest you to perform a through surface scan of the disk to see if its defective, and then repartition it. fat32 performance degrade drastically as partition size grow, usually each fat32 partition shall not be larger than 16gb at most, under 8gb is recommended.

Reply 2 of 2, by nforce4max

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Maxtor isn't the best even back in the day but noshutdown summed up the problem.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

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