Samsung EStool AJ41 error

I tried last week to install a new motherboard in my AMD Socket A system. After a day of rebooting and recabling, I RMA'd the refurbished MSI 7037 board.

On reassembling the original system my Samsung Spinrite 300 GB Hard drive no longer plays nice with my older Maxtor 60 GB drive. I had not moved the jumpers: the Maxtor is master, the Samsung slave.

It insists on being on its own IDE cable. Then WinXP and Linux Mint work fine, but then I have no DVD drive as it needs to be on its own IDE cable, so I cannot load anything from optical media.

The BIOS reports gibberish when the Samsung is on a cable with the Maxtor. The BIOS sees the drive as 137 GB. Auto detect changes nothing.

Now this drive has worked properly for years. I ran Spinrite 6, a frequent miracle worker, and it protested that the BIOS id's the drive as the wrong size and would do nothing.

I ran Samsung's EStool. The drive passed several brief read tests, but then failed the "ram verify" test with an AJ41 error. Many have written online saying to ignore this error if the drive appears to function normally in your favorite OS. But I still can't cable the two drives off a single IDE port.

The Samsung test warns me to back up all data and low-level format the drive. The name "ram verify," though, makes me think of a fried chip, not bad config data written to the drive.


I could buy a USB external drive, back up all my data and low-level format the goofy drive. Or I could get a cheap new SATA DVD burner and use it on a new mobo, so that each device has its own port. Or I could get a new SATA drive and again run each device off its own cable.

One thing I want to avoid is buying two new 300+ GB drives, one external and one internal.