Maxtor Ripoff their hard drive 200gig killed my motherboard Milpitas California

James,
While it's pretty much impossible to tell from your posting what exactly your problem is, as an independent PC technician I can make an educated guess. It looks as though from what you are saying that you have an older computer. What's probably going on is that the BIOS on the motherboard cannot recognize a 200 gig drive or must be told to identify it in the BIOS setup utility.

You say that the machine sees it as "D" slave drive. Is that what you wanted? If you wanted it to be the "C" drive it must be jumpered that way. Also the drive must be partitioned and formatted. You can't just hook up a drive and expect it to work out of the box, and unless you copy the Windows partition from the old drive (with special software) to the new one you must re-install Windows on the new drive. I've used Maxtor drives for years without a problem and while no product is always perfect, their drives seem to be up to industry standards.

The bottom line is that if your system does a "post" i.e. shows you video card or chip, memory, drive etc. you motherboard is not "fried" Whoever told you to buy a new motherboard and processor probably meant that the one you have cannot deal with the large capacity drive. This may or may not be true as Maxtor includes a utility with their drives called "Maxblast" which will can with that issue and copy your lod partition as well.

In conclusion, I guess what I'm saying is that it sounds like you're in over your head here and that your level of expertise is not up to the task. Try to find a tech that will deal with your problem. To give you an idea it would take me 1-2 hrs to "fix" it and I charge $40 per hour. Sorry, I don't travel to Georgia