HDD Dead? HELP!!!

[moosey]

My setup on an asus a7v600 is
1. Serial ATA Raptor w/ windows XP
2. 80gb maxtor serial ata (4 partitions)

The problem was that windows all of a sudden would get to the loading screen and stop. I disconnected the maxtor drive and it worked fine. I tried switching cables and which channel the drive was on and nothing worked. The maxtor drive is still recognized but I can't get to it.

Is there any way to get the data off of the maxtor drive? Is there anything else I can do?

 

[mechBgon]

Try this:

• Boot from your Windows CD and it will ask if you want to do a Repair or a fresh installation (naturally, you will need to do the F6 thing and have the SATA drivers on floppy if you intend to use the SATA drive for the boot drive). This first time that it asks, choose fresh installation.
• Setup gets ready for a couple minutes, then looks at your hard drive and sees the C:\WINDOWS folder, and offers to repair it. Now choose Repair and it will go ahead and overwrite the Windows installation... but not your data files. Rescue them to somewhere safe (network folder or another drive, perhaps) and then optionally do a full reformat/reinstall of the C:\ partition and Windows.

Good luck 🙂 Another approach would be to give it a second, parallel installation of Windows in a different folder than the existing one.

 

[moosey]

There is no windows installed on the maxtor drive. its only on the Raptor I have. Both are SATA though. I did try booting with the windows cd and did the f6 thing and it got to the stage where it detected the maxtor drive but it seems like it would not go past that point. Any suggestions?

 

[mechBgon]

Ugh. So Windows won't boot when the Maxtor is hooked up to the motherboard, and the Maxtor contains stuff you want to recover.

😕

If you had a spare PCI SATA card, you could try putting the Maxtor on that, I suppose... What I would try next, assuming you don't have any other SATA-ready systems or SATA cards, is running Maxtor's PowerMax disk utility from a bootable floppy, and see if it can make any headway or shed any light on the situation. Good luck! 🙁

 

[moosey]

Unfortunatly, powermax does not support SATA now...its on their site.
Would booting from an EIDE HDD and then messing with the maxtor drive on the SATA channels somehow pay off?
Thanks again

 

[mechBgon]

I'd sure try it if it were me, yeah. A temporary installation of Windows on an IDE drive to see if you can get access to the Maxtor sounds like it's worth a shot.

 

[moosey]

Any other ideas at least on how I can retrieve my data? Anyone?

 

[mechBgon]

Well, what about a PCI SATA controller? Then your Western Digital could boot (hopefully) and once you had made it into Windows, you could install the drivers for the PCI SATA card and see if you can see the Maxtor in Windows Disk Management to re-assign its partitions/volumes some drive letters. If the drive shows up in Disk Management but has lost its partitioning, then things get Extra Fun and you may want to try PC Inspector from http://www.pcinspector.de (freeware file-recovery software).

 

[moosey]

Do you think that if I can boot off an EIDE drive and still can't see the maxtor that it would show up with an SATA card? and can you recommend a cheap SATA card that would do the trick?

 

[mechBgon]

My brainstorm was that the Western Digital and Maxtor might be fighting. They're both on the same controller and Windows is trying to boot from that controller, so my hunch was that getting them onto two different controllers might help. But setting up Windows on an IDE drive accomplishes that too, and probably in a better way since Windows deals with IDE drives natively.

All in all, I'm guessing the Maxtor has probably had a partial failure somehow, maybe a motor or actuator failure, and while its electronic half is visible to the controller, its mechanical half is toast or something. Not a very technical way of putting it... but I bet the drive had a stroke 😉 🙁