Best part about online CSR chats vs. telephone assistance: you can save the conversation without having to question the legality of recording it. And then within minutes you can post their ridiculousness.

I have never used an online customer support chat and been successful. At best, they can give me a link or a product number, but that is at best. Technical support via live chat has always been poor, and always dismissive. I've stopped using it unless I need something real basic.

Doing some quick research - and, believe me, I'm not saying that he was 'in his place' in telling you to go somewhere else for support - there's a reasonable explanation for the issue.

It would seem that it is indeed an operating system issue at fault here. Windows XP (32-bit) imposes an MBR limitation that, with 512K sectors and NTFS formatting, makes a 2 TB drive the absolute upper limit of single-volume capacities readable by the operating system.

This problem was bypassed in Windows Vista (I believe only 64-bit... it could also be 32-bit) and certain versions of Windows Server (2k3, 2k8).

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's a reasonable enough explanation for the issue and might help out the OP in this case.

At least you know their CSRs are on-shored? (Based on the colloquial umbrage.)

Sounds like that tech support guy was working from a script or only knew very basic troubleshooting.

Some tech support, that's how they tell you to do it. They show you where your knowledge base is and tell you to use it to troubleshoot problems, even though there are many problems that aren't in the knowledge base.

Evidently this was one was so the CSR just kept running with the closest solution he could find. Or because he didn't know what in the hell to do, he just tried to pass you off to MS and let them worry about it.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!):

Fat wad of good it did him!

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): I know, it's so hard to understand when they type with a thick accent.

@Gregory Lusk: I recently contacted AOL about a problem with my account information and they directed me to a Chat CSR. Surprisingly enough, the experience went very smoothly, very efficiently, and the rep was perfectly courteous and listened. I was shocked, but in a good way. I'd never expected such service from AOL even having been with them for nearly 20 years. Just goes to show, there are the occasional good experiences out there.

I like how he says that XP and Vista file naming conventions "aren't compatible." Its always fun to find people that obviously have no qualifications, certifications, or legitimate schooling for the product or technology they are supposed to be providing support for.

Why did he send it to the Investor Relations Dept?

@Gregory Lusk: See i have found this to be the opposite. I have had 2 fantastic live chat experiences. First with buy.com. I wanted a price match and spent 10+ emails going back and forth to get it matched (them saying its the wrong product cause they were comparing it to a similar but different product i listed) which they agreed to then failed to credit me for. So i used the live chat and in 5 mins credited and fixed.

And BOA where i accidently opened 2 accounts (don't ask) and needed 1 closed which took 5 mins and solved again.

Maybe ive been lucky. I think its mainly cause the csr's (if they are not doing both) dont have to deal with the annoying voices of customers all day, or the shouting. Because shouting IN TEXT FORM is no where near as annoying :D

Sounds like the CS person knew at least SOMETHING...

Beside, why would anyone think anything is a "Hardware" issue with running things with Microsoft... its 99.999% of the time a "software" issue within Windows OS.

Props to Seagate for putting this customer in place!

@DashTheHand:

I have no doubt that the Seagate CSR has an A+, a degree, and all the requisite training.

Just because someone is "qualified" and has the "certifications," that doesn't mean the individual in question knows anything at all.

I haven't done too much with Vista, but is there any chance that XP can't read the version of NTFS or whichever filesystem you formatted the external with?

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Colloquial Umbrage is my new band name.

@rwalford79:
"I suspect that the software supplied with the Maxtor drive is at fault."

The first thing you did wrong was to use the software they provided.

@Don_Thate: possible, but the drive it's self is 2 TB, meaning it would be at the limit.

The other thing is, and I might be mistaken because my primary OS is OSX, even if it hit the 2TB limit, it should still display up to 2TB.

@SJ Stanaitis: HE formatted it in FAT. Even OSX can read FAT.

CSR was right, albeit a bit douchey about it. It IS an OS problem.

@Don_Thate: You've got a bit right, but what you have right doesn't explain the customer's problem. 32-bit XP does have a 2TB limitation per volume. 64-bit XP, Vista and later OSs do not have this limitation. Plus, the customer is using a Maxtor OneTouch 2TB drive in RAID 1 format, which means that there should only be 1TB available, in which case it doesn't exceed the 2TB limit anyway.

It may be possible that there's an allocation unit size supported by Vista but not by XP, but the customer would probably have had to have chosen that size, since the default allocation unit size would be supported by XP.

@Don_Thate: I read even further and its even more clear he turned the drive into a 1RAID 1 TB drive in FAT format. There should have been no reason the OS couldn't see it, as its under the limit (and I know XP can deal with 1TB) as well as its formatted in a format that even other OSs will read these days.

@Nick Bornemann: The presumable answer is that he owns stock in Seagate and investor relations is higher on the totem pole than customer relations.

@Nick Bornemann: He invested in the company by purchasing their drive. Now he will (probably) no longer be investing in the company due to the poor customer service experience he had. It's pretty much an easy way to do an EECB.

I will agree that the issue most likely lies with the mirroring software the OP is using. The tech should have had the customer jump through some hoops to make sure there were no other issues rather than getting so defensive.

About online chat: I prefer it.
I learned to really appreciate it when I would chat with the Dell Server technicians (who of course were offshore). I don't doubt their knowledge on certain subjects and if chat can remove the small language barrier (plus I can send logs and such to them, rather than trying to read it off). This has made using chat a very pleasant experience.

I also appreciate the fact that I do have a log of the conversation if I need it.

@Don_Thate: The two drives in the enclosure are mirroring (RAID 1) and thus are read as a 1TB partition.

@SJ Stanaitis: No. There is no filesystem incompatibility between XP and Vista.

@Jim Topoleski: It's highly improbable that the drive is formatted to FAT32 - the OP referred to "the FAT", implying that he was trying to say that the filesystem itself was corrupt (NTFS uses a bitmap for file allocation, but FAB has never really caught on as an acronym). With FAT32, the maximum partition size is 32 GB and the maximum filesize is 4 GB. Neither of those limitations is particularly palatable with a 1 TB drive.

I'm stickin' with Western Digital for my drives :)

@summerbee: Chat is good for anything technically (something that would require copy/paste of error reports and such), but for a lot of other things it's a hassle.

If you live in a state where one-party consent to recording is the law, as I happen to, I would still use the phone, personally. It's harder to fake a phone recording, and it's often easier to explain certain problems over the phone.

However, yes, while the law is still lagging behind a little, I would use chat logs if you're in a two-party consent to recording state.

This falls into the "we've all thought it, but we don't say it" category of job complaints. I've heard almost the exact same phrasing from all the tech-support workers I know -- off the clock. Because they're not idiots.

It may be annoying to have people call up with their own ideas of what's wrong, but my God, if all workers said just what they were thinking to their customers...

OP should call back and try it this way:

"Mr. CSR, I have a 2TB Maxtor OneTouch III ext drive. Is it possible to [or: How do I] set it up as a 1TB mirror in a RAID1 format and have it recognizable and usable under both Vista and XP?"

@summerbee: Amen! Use their own technology against them.

@SJ Stanaitis: That was an issue between Win98 and XP with NTFS. It shouldn't be an issue between XP and Vista.

I dunno... I'm torn on this one. On the one hand he shouldn't have been rude to her. On the other (assuming what he said is true), I know what its like to have someone tell you that you're wrong repeatedly over and over when you do this thing for 10 hours a day, 4 days a week for 3 years.

(This particularly happens when someone says to me,"The Link liight on my modem is blinking.. its never done that before." And I explain thats just the modems way of showing its sending data and they respond,"But its never done that before its always been solid and now I can't connect to my Vonage." And I have to again state, the link light doesn't always have to blink, as long as its on or its blinking its sending data out... and I have to go back and forth because the rep believes Vonage is right and we're wrong. Even though they are connecting to the internet and are on their home digital phone... sorry getting off subject here.)

I'm not blaming the OP, the OP has every right to be upset and the tech support guy should have been a bit more specific as to the exact reason (If he's as fed up as I think he is, it would behoove him to learn why and have a better explanation than,"Its the OS, deal with it.").

@thnkwhatyouthnk: please people by the cheapest and best product for the money and seagate is often times the cheapest he'll be back

@takes_so_little: I heard they have different keys in other countries!!!

Here is the executive email for this one:

Brian.E.Wilkes@seagate.com

what I get from this.

OP: Hi I have a unique problem.

CSR: Great! We have a simple solution

OP: Oh great, what is it?

CSR: Ask another company.

END!

@Haroludo: The only other issue I see with chat besides the fact most of the chatters are in India, China or Russia somewhere, is they are generally non-technical, script based and they are actually chatting with 8+ users at the same time, resulting in 5+ minute long pauses between replies.

@CumaeanSibyl: sometimes the customer isn't always right and that notion needs to be explained.

@Skankingmike: I don't think sarcasm is the way to go about doing that.

Cool that the CS Rep supports Mac OS 10.6, given that it's not out yet and all.

i had the same thing happen to me last year. took my old laptop HD and used it to back up files between my new vista desktop and my old XP desktop. i had a bunch of media files (personal pictures, mp3s, etc) from the vista.
i connected the HD to the XP computer to get some old personal pictures off of there, and it kept saying the HD wasn't formatted, and offering to format it.
i plugged it back into the vista desktop to double check wtf was going on, but it somehow was now corrupted by the XP computer, and i lost everything that was on there.

@CumaeanSibyl: Oh definatly out of line.

But the notion that the customer is always right needs to go away. The customer is not always right and often times isn't even left :P

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): I know you're being facetious, Ms. McGee, but I still must say I'd rather have a polite outsourced CSR than a crabby local one.

@BillyDee_CT: i had a 23-month old WD MyBook external fail last month... I put it into a new enclosure, and the drive works perfectly now. (turns out there are some issues with that model's enclosure dying. also, my bad USB ports probably didn't help)

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Nice analysis, for a sleep deprived soul.

@rwalford79: Ok here is the tech breakdown.

1: XP does not support RAID volumes without add on software
2: The drive works when conntected to another computer (no hardware issue)
3: The software works on other xp computers, if it didn't there would be a lot more griping and lawsuits on this issue

Only answer left, The software install is corrupted or xp is not properly loading the software.

@Don_Thate: *Sigh* Why would anyone use any version of Windows?