Maxtor Acoustic Management

[Richard Hayden]

Hi,

I am running Windows XP with a Promise IDE TX2 UDMA100 controller card
connected to a 60Gb Maxtor 7200RPM UDMA 100 DiamondMax Plus 60 hard disc.

I am trying to use Maxtor's AMSET (Acoustic Management) utility to increase
the speed of my HDD's seeks (at the expense of louder seeks). To do this you
need to boot into DOS from a boot disk (I created one using the Windows XP
format utility), as the AMSET application will not run in a Windows
environment and must be run from pure DOS. The AMSET utility was also put on
to the floppy disk. After successfully booting to the A:\ prompt, I
attempted to run the utility. The first thing it does is to search your
primary and secondary motherboard IDE controllers for Maxtor HDDs. It found
none, which was expected as I have no HDDs on the mobo controllers. It was
then (according to the documentation) supposed to check any attached
controller cards for Maxtor HDDs, but it acted as if I don't have a
controller card connected and skipped that stage. It then quitted because it
thought that there were no Maxtor hard disks installed on my machine. All of
my partitions are NTFS, but this should have no effect as this utility does
not need to access partitions, it just changes a low-level setting in the
hard disk itself.

The Promise controller card says that it is searching and has successfully
found my Maxtor hard disk on system boot, and Windows XP loads successfully
off of it. I have had no other problems with this drive or my system as a
whole.

For more information on this AMSET utility, please visit this URL:
http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/techsupport/technicalprocedures/21
007.html

I'm extremely confused and annoyed as to why this utility doesn't detect my
Maxtor disk, although the above page does say that some controller cards are
not yet supported, but I would have thought my one would be as it is quite
popular.

I would be extremely grateful for any help/advice,

Thanks,

Richard Hayden.

[Eric Gross]

The utility doesn't seem to work with any IDE controllers that aren't built
into the southbridge of the chipset (that I've tried at least). The simplest
workaround is to just temporarily connect your hard drive to your onboard
IDE controller and run the utility, then move the cable back to the other
IDE controller.

-Eric Gross

"Richard Hayden" <rahay...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9tr7d1$hmd$1...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...

[Mr Garfield]

Yes, to what Eric said, as AAM is "sticky" and stays
set or cleared over power cycles.

Garfield

On Sun, 25 Nov 2001 22:27:06 -0500, "Eric Gross" <ec...@po.cwru.edu>
wrote:

[Tom Cumming]

Only guessing, but could you temporarily connect the hard drive to a
motherboard IDE channel, make the changes you want, and then put it back
again? Or would it then "forget" the changes you made?

--
Tom Cumming
tcumm...@I.have.not.won.$1000000.yahoo.co.uk