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From: John_B on 6 Sep 2005 23:05
I recently was given ten DiamondMax 8 drives from Maxtor. (Of course,
they're all out of warranty.) All of them exhibit the well-known "N40P"
problem due to the drives losing their on-disk firmware. As a result,
they fail upon every boot-up. Sometimes they appear as drive "N40P"
(Maxtor's internal description for these drives) but more often than not
they show up as "6E040L1" (40 GB) even though these are supposed to be
30 GB drives.

A quick search on Google reveals that a huge number of people worldwide
ran into problems with these drives losing their on-disk firmware.

Unfortunately, the only methods of getting firmware back onto them are
by a $400 software product from China or by a combination
hardware/software package from Russia. I don't know how much it is, but
I doubt it's cheap. These drives don't even have a market value of
$400, so paying anywhere close to that much money to make them usable
again is pointless. I have no interest in recovering data from them. I
only want to try to make them useable again. I found firmware from some
Russian site, but I have no method or tool to get the firmware back onto
the disk.

I don't want to get rid of the drives as they appear to be in good shape
other than the firmware issue. They're all quiet and they all spin up
properly, so it appears that physically they're in good shape. Does
anyone know of any easy way, besides the two commercial packages
mentioned above, to get the firmware back onto the drive?
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