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hard drive only works occasionally

J

JimS

Member
I have a Maxtor 300GB SATA drive from circa 2005 that's been out of use for less than two years. When I last used it, it was working fine. Today I decided to install it into a media player. It didn't recognize it. So I took it out and connected it to my desktop system (the same system it came out of originally) and it wasn't recognized there either. I put my ear to it and I could hear it spinning up and making a few seeking sounds when I applied power, and it didn't make any strange sounds. In other words, it sounds like a normal startup. After cycling power once more, suddenly it was recognized by the system. So I thought OK, fine, maybe it was just stuck or something. I formatted it with no problems. Took it out of the system and put it back in the media player. No go. Logged into the media player and looked at the kernel messages and yep, the SATA driver is failing to find any devices. I cycled the power quite a few times on the media tank and even though I can hear the drive spinning, it just won't recognize it. I haven't had time to try moving it back to the desktop again, but I don't know what I'd gain by that. So, other than "your drive is hosed", any thoughts on what's happening?
 
I had two Maxtor 250 GB disks from that same era. The first one burned up the first day while transferring 200 GB of data to it.

The second one was working when I last accessed it. The computer was turned off for several months. Next time I turned it on, I had problems accessing it and when I could some of the files were inaccessible. That got worse and worse as I attempted to copy off what I could. Finally the disk quit working completely.

That series of disks was known for burning up one of its controller chips. Take a look at the chips on the PC board on the disk and look for a corner of one where it looks burned. There are also several other known failure modes for that generation of Maxtor disk.

It sounds like you lost no data, which is great. 500 GB disks can be had on sale for $40.
 
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