The PowerMax utility is designed to perform diagnostic read/write verifications on Maxtor and Quantum hard drives. These tests will determine hard drive integrity. The PowerMax utility is effective on all ATA (IDE) hard drives with a capacity greater than or equal to 500 MB. Maxtor recommends the use of this utility for troubleshooting potential hard drive problems. These problems include, but are not limited to the following:
Note: PowerMax v 4.09 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 3, Force 4, VIA KT 600 and KT800 chipsets. If the hard disk is connected to an unsupported controller, it will have to be moved to an alternate system, or controller for diagnosis. Please check the PowerMax download page periodically for updates. Beginning June 1st 2004 all versions of PowerMax prior to v4.09 will no longer be supported. Maxtor recommends that you update to version 4.09 before testing your hard disk.
It is recommended to run PowerMax on all Maxtor hard drives prior to
warranty replacement.
What are the
difference between the
original PowerMax (distribuited by Maxtor) and this one?
No one. This is just an ISO version, made for those users that can
not create a boot-floppy of PowerMax for many reason: first of all,
lots of computers are now sold without a floppy disk drive; second, the
original utility can be used only on a Windows machine or on OS/2 (the
utility starts at boot, but the boot-floppy can be only generated
from Windows or OS/2).
Then, people can prefer a boot-cd instead a boot-floppy.
In the download section you can find the ISO file of PowerMax,
useful to make boot-cd with most of cd-burning software, and an IMG
file, that can be used to make PowerMax boot-floppy under UNIX systems.
The home page of the original PowerMax, distributed by Maxtor, is here.