By Bob LaFave, Tampa PC Users Group
boblala@ij.net

A few months ago I started my computer and received the message, “Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM: Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter.” I went and quickly hit Alt-Ctrl-Del to reboot and see what had happened. Luckily the next boot went without problems, but I would receive the same message from time to time on startup, and I started to debug the drive. I ran the Maxtor utility “ Power Max” and received an error code: N80S20, with a reference to “Smart Parameter Failure” and instructions to “Please call Maxtor service and support ...”, along with other instructions. I called the toll free number and easily got a service representative. After reading the error codes to them, I was issued a RMA and told I would have a replacement shipped within 3-5 days. This took less than 5 minutes; my only concern was that they could not tell me what was going BAD with the hard drive or how long it would last.

Boy, was I glad I could still get the computer going by just rebooting. I never had to do Alt-Ctrl-Del more than 3 times, but I could still boot, and I hoped to not lose the defective hard drive until I received the replacement. I had a complete image of the drive on CD’s made with Veriatas Simple Backup within 2 months’ time and also had Power Quest Drive Image 3, so I was not too concerned.

I received the new hard drive seven days after calling and proceeded to transfer the complete hard drive to the new one. I first tried Drive Image 3 and for some reason never got very far. After starting the program and verifying the drives and determining what needed to get transferred, I would get an error message about “ Not Enough Memory” before it would start the transfer, and after 3 tries I gave up on Drive Copy. I have 512 MB of ram and didn’t want to bother with finding out why it didn’t work, yet. I still had a complete “Restore” using the CD’s that I had made using Veritas Simple Backup. I proceeded to doing the complete restore, and, following instructions, I fed my CD’s in and finally finished and went to restart as instructed. This was simple to do, as easy as using, say, HP’s restore procedure that comes with their computers. I had restored several HP’s for people using their restore CD’s, and, except that I had many more, 16 in total, the Veritas process was as easy as HP’s. I had no problem restarting and went about seeing what I actually had.

After looking at my Desktop and directory structure, I was fairly certain that I had a good Restore and turned off the computer and went to bed. On startup, I received an error about finding Registry problems and went ahead and ran Scanreg from my WinME startup diskette. I restarted and got all the way to the Desktop and then noticed that it appeared different. It looked as if several icons were missing, and, after looking at my directory structure, it appeared I was missing programs. I restarted hoping it would get better. It didn’t! Again, I got the Registry error message and, after using Scanreg from the Startup diskette again, I got to the Desktop. This wasn’t promising, as the Desktop showed differently yet again. I have fought Microsoft before so …… Let me see plans A and B flopped so here goes plan C.

Maxtor includes a utility with its hard drives called Max Blast Plus II, and it not only will check for correct installation and doing format for Fat32, it also has the ability to copy from one drive to another. I had asked the Maxtor representative about this feature when I had originally called and he stated if I had another program such as Drive Copy, I should use it first, noting the Maxtor utility was very basic and not that good. Guess what?

Running the Maxtor copy program took almost the same amount of time as the Restore I had done, was actually easy to follow, and I was able to get to my Desktop without any error messages. COOL. This was looking promising. Nothing appeared to be changed on either the Desktop or the directory structure so I started to check each installed program by starting it. I found two programs that had problems and would not start so I uninstalled each and then reinstalled. It worked and I’m back to where I was. It took about 8 hours total over 3 days to get there, and, again, it was a learning experience. I now have a new 3-year warranty on a new hard drive and “I gained space”. The old drive was 60 Gig and 5400-RPM but no longer available, so I got an 80 Gig 7200-RPM hard drive as a replacement. u