MacFixIt readers are now on a story I ran into about a year ago: Maxtor has such horrible customer support that if you call them to return a defective hard drive, they will only accept the RMA if you have the drive plugged into a Windows PC and ran their utility on it. If you have a dead drive in a Macintosh, they'll take it as well, but if you attach it to any other ATA bus, they'll say "we don't support that under warranty" and refuse the return, even if the drive was dead out of the box.

I spent over two hours on the phone with Maxtor support on this issue, and they insist on the bizarre notion that only ATA buses connected to certain motherboards are reliable for their drives. This is, of course, bilge.

The solution? Don't talk to Maxtor. Use the Web-based form for RMAs and the computers will approve any serial number under warranty.

Oh, and try not to buy Maxtor hard drives if you have a choice. They seem to work OK, but the company's support is designed around a goal of not supporting the product.