Okay, this is my issue: I have 160 GB Maxtor HDD that I use with HD Advance 3.0. At first when I used winhiip to format it and the whole nine I couldn't get any game I put on it to load up. The HDD would always load and go to the HD Advance main screen where I would select the game run it. After that I would instantly receive the black screen of death everytime I loaded a game no matter what game it is. I know for a fact all the games work perfectly because I also own the official Sony HDD and every game I have works and runs fine on it with no problems.

So after trying a few things I reformatted it using HD Advance 3.0 on the PS2 itself when it told me my HDD needed to be formatted and would I like to do it. I noticed that after I did that and used Winhiip again to put the ISO's back on it suddenly now the games were loading up...however, now the HDD would only load the game until it finished showing all the logos and right when your about to get to the games main menu...black screen of death again. I thought I had fixed it by formatting it with HD Advance but I was wrong, however it's still progress considering before it wouldn't even load the game at all when I formatted it using Winhiip alone. So I'm wondering why that is?

I even tried formatting my Maxtor HDD on my PC using disk management to make it a NTFS drive but for some reason every time I tried it would say it was formatting but I wouldn't know how long its taking (which seemed forever) and it didn't seem like it was working. So I'm not sure if that's something that needs to be done for it to work properly. Or if I need to do a full erase of the HDD instead of a quick erase in Winhiip. I even ran a scan/repair on it with Winhiip and everything checked out fine. I mean I feel like I'm close since I can get the game to atleast load now. But all in all I am completely stumped at this point and would appreciate any help anyone can provide me. Thank you in advance.

The number one thing to check is to make sure your Maxtor is compatible with HD Advance: PS2 Hard Drive Compatibility Chart

Have you tried booting the games in different modes? About 95% of games are compatible with HD Advance, 5% won't boot or freeze. Here's a compatibility list:

Absolute Anime / HD Loader Game Compatibility List

Try different modes: HDAdvance - The ultimate Game Storage Solution for the Playstation 2

Also, make sure your jumper settings are set correctly.

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Yes I tried all the compatibility modes, I even turned them all on to yes and still it would only load the games to through the logos and that's it. And yes I checked my Maxtor's HDD compatibility preferences with that list. I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 model No: 6L160P0 and it is definitely on that chart. Also I have my Jumper set to MASTER so I don't know what's going on.

Does the HD itself work for normal purposes? Perhaps you can throw it in a PC or test it out if you have an external enclosure, format it to NTFS, and see if it works okay.

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Yes I've put it on my PC and it works fine. I've put ISO's on it using Winhiip and everything. They only things I haven't done is format it in winhiip using a full erase or partial erase. Also I haven't been able to fully do that formatting to NTFS thing, so I'm wondering if that may be the issue and if I should do that?

Its just weird that before I formatted it with HD Advance I couldn't even get the game to run, it was just instant black screen. But when I did format it with HD Advance it would load through the game logos and freeze when you're about to get to the main screen.

Trying a full erase in Winhiip isn't a bad idea. It's sounds like you've eliminated most of the obvious causes for boot failures. If I had to guess, Winhiip's erase/format options are probably much more powerful than HDAdvance.

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Well I tried the NTFS format on my PC...it went all the way to 100% and then told me it could not format it successfully for whatever reason. I'm gonna go ahead and do the Winhiip full erase now.