Hacking 200GB maxtor personal storage 5000DV

[astraldata]

Obviously I'm having problems getting my USB hard drive to work. Here's the deal:

My hard drive is recognized in all usb loaders, but it is only recognized for about three minutes, if that long, before it vanishes. However, as long as I load a game quickly, I can use it to load games and they work just fine. It obviously works fine on windows and is WBFS formatted correctly, so the problem has to be the HD.

I read somewhere that the hardrives sometimes sleep, which can cause errors, and if so, how in the heck do I disable this on my drive??

I don't know if this is helpful, but it has an external power source, so it's likely to do this to keep from getting hot. However, the only reason I bought the drive is to play my wii games on it, so I don't mind that. I need to be able to keep the drive active somehow, and the only time I can get it to work is when I unplug the power cord on the HD and then plug it back in just as I'm starting my usbloader, but I only have, at MOST, one to three minutes to load a game.

Please help! I've been messing around with this for months!

 

[dsfanatic5]

Google "Seagate Manager" or "Maxtor Manager." Either program should allow you to set the standby mode to NEVER. I think that's your main problem.

 

[icebrg5]

download a program called maxtor manager.It should detect it and allow you turn off the spindown.If that doesnt work then try seagates software that does the same thing.I dont know the name of seagates though but it might work on your drive since seagate bought out maxtor some time ago.Look on seagates website for their version of the software.

If neither of those fix the issue then search on this board for hdparm/sdparm.Its another program that should allow you to change some settings on the hard drive including spindown.

Not all drives can be turned off though.I have a 100gb maxtor drive that i put in an external case with its own power supply and i can not turn the spindown off at all.Maxtor and seagate software will not even see the drive and hdparm will let me change the settings but when the drive is turned off it looses the settings.

 

[astraldata]

Maxtor didn't work. It didn't even detect my drive. However, my drive seems to be the first One Touch, not One Touch 4.

EDIT:

The seagate thing is telling me that the settings aren't available for this drive through the eSATA cable, and to connect using the USB cable (of which I already have plugged in). So, obviously that option is out unless someone can tell me wtf this is talking about or some way around it...

Also, what's this hdparm/sdparm thing? How do you use it and where can I find it? I googled hdparm, but it seemed to only be for mac or just a command line tool, and both of those I suck at using.

 

[riddle43]

heres an odd idea have you tried a new USB cable i had kind of the same prob turned out to be my cable who knows give it a shot it may work

good luck

 

[hdhacker]

I don't think the old Maxtor One Touch drives can be modified.

What CIOS rev are you using? People have claimed their sleep problems went away with rev 12 or by using Hermes.

 

[astraldata]

I have CIOS rev13, and I have tried using Hermes as well as the modified version of Hermes for mplayer ce.

Also the seagate thing didn't work. It reads my drive as an eSATA interface and tells me to plug in the USB cable, but I heard that Windows XP reads USB drives as SATA interfaces for sdparm. If only I could change this I should be able to alter my settings, but how could one change how the OS reads the drive? And why would it ask me to plug in a USB cable on top of that??

The sdparm thing seems to be my only option now, but I don't know where to get it or how in the world to use it. If this doesn't work, I don't know what to do... Surely there are more alternatives than these out there for adjusting the spindown time?

 

[astraldata]

Okay, it looks as though my only hope is the sdparm. I've tried everything else possible, but no software works, not even the original OneTouch stuff. I'm going to have to disable it manually, even if it means me screwing up my hdd.

So, could someone point me somewhere that would allow me to see where to learn how to use this program, or at least get the right version?

I'm not familiar with linux, but all I see is stuff about linux versions of this program. I haven't seen anything about windows aside from off hand remarks that it can be used on it.

 

[icebrg5]

Another program i used is called Crystal Disc Info.


Just google it.It should be the 1st result.



It let me change the setting but after a power cycle on the drive all settings were lost.

I gave up on my drive.
I might give it some more testing later with ciosrev12.
I tested it with rev9,10,12 and both 13/13b and i still had freezing issues with all them but some went longer before freezing then others.

 

[astraldata]

I tried the Crystal Disc Info program too, but for some reason my drive won't even show up. I did the power cycle for all the programs I tried. I would be happy if I could just temporarily change the power down state.

I don't have any other way but the USB port to connect my drive to my computer, and that HDD Scan program didn't like this even though it could recognize my drive. The features weren't available to change its sleep time.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's sleeping at all. I played Wii Sports Resort JP just fine with it, but it had to be loaded quickly. If I didn't load it within about a minute or two, the game would freeze on a black screen. Otherwise, it played great. However, when returning to the Wii Menu, it didn't work so well. That was when it froze. Thus, it led me to believe my HD was going to sleep, even though it seemed to load all the different kinds of events just fine -- at least while I was in game.

Any ideas??

 

[icebrg5]

I tried the Crystal Disc Info program too, but for some reason my drive won't even show up. I did the power cycle for all the programs I tried. I would be happy if I could just temporarily change the power down state.

I don't have any other way but the USB port to connect my drive to my computer, and that HDD Scan program didn't like this even though it could recognize my drive. The features weren't available to change its sleep time.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's sleeping at all. I played Wii Sports Resort JP just fine with it, but it had to be loaded quickly. If I didn't load it within about a minute or two, the game would freeze on a black screen. Otherwise, it played great. However, when returning to the Wii Menu, it didn't work so well. That was when it froze. Thus, it led me to believe my HD was going to sleep, even though it seemed to load all the different kinds of events just fine -- at least while I was in game.

Any ideas??

its loading the events in the game just fine because its actually loading from the hard drive the entire time.Try playing a game of mario kart where you play the 4 tracks in a row and it doesnt constantly read from the drive.It will let you finish a race or two and then freeze up because it stopped loading from the drive because one track is all it loads at a time and it takes a few minutes to finish all 3 laps so therefor it locks up.

Thats what it does on my 100gb external maxtor at least.

 

[astraldata]

its loading the events in the game just fine because its actually loading from the hard drive the entire time.Try playing a game of mario kart where you play the 4 tracks in a row and it doesnt constantly read from the drive.It will let you finish a race or two and then freeze up because it stopped loading from the drive because one track is all it loads at a time and it takes a few minutes to finish all 3 laps so therefor it locks up.

Thats what it does on my 100gb external maxtor at least.

Okay, I'll test it out just to be sure that's the case. However, in the mean time, I found your post by chance after searching the net for hdparm. XD

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=1389393

Luckily I found sdparm for windows, too, here, in this pack of programs, but it seems to need to be compiled:

http://partedmagic.com/programs.html

Hdparm wouldn't work with my usb drive, so I needed something that would mess with USB devices too. This looks like its much more powerful, but it's hard to figure out and I have no experience whatsoever in compiling things. I can't seem to find a windows binary precompiled anywhere for sdparm.

Here's the link to some good documentation on it if you want to check it out:

http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sdparm.html#mozTocId891504

Hopefully it might be able to help us both.

 

[icebrg5]

hdparm only seems to work if the drive is hooked up internal.I took it out of its 3.5 external case and stuck it in my desktop.It allows me to change all the needed settings but like i said once a power cycle happens to the drive it looses the settings.

Its an issue with the drive.Its an older drive probly 5 years old.Theres nothing i can do about.Hdparm has settings to change spindown and it has a setting that makes the drive remember settings even after a power cycle.The only problem is that it doesnt remember all settings after a power cycle.Only certain ones and spindown isnt one of them.


A lot of people say that the newer cios fix this issue but ive used rev12 with the drive and it still frooze up.Also hermes cios supposedly fixes it as well.Im not sure about that one i never tried it and probly wont either.

A lot of people seem to think that the usb loaders themselves can fix the issue by writing a small piece of programming into the loader that will write a very small file to the hard drive every few minutes to keep the drive from going to sleep.Im not sure if this is possible or not yet.