Maxtor Drive Problems!

[rocketPack]

Hello everyone,

An important client came into the computer store I work at today and dropped off his rig for an upgrade. I built him a new sysem and then tried to boot into windows to set everything up. I got that stupid "NTLDR is missing" message so I popped in the WindowsXP CD and went to recovery console.
It took about a full minute after the keyboard thing finished before it displayed C:\>. I typed "dir" just as a test and it paused. The screen went black for about another minute before it displayed a message; something to the effect of the directory or drive is unreadable.
I typed chkdsk and got just about the same result, with a slightly different message; something to the effect of "the specificed drive contains unrecoverable errors and cannot be read".
Soooo I took it to another computer and attached it as a master on the secondary IDE channel. I turned the machine on and (despite the fact that this drive was not even somewhat affiliated with the boot drive) got an INVALID BOOT DISK error.
So I attached it as a master to the IDE controller card on the machine and it booted. Once in windows the disk was not recognized and did not show up in the drive list. The entire time it was connected to this machine (this is just FYI) it was the only disk on the cable, and all jumper settings and cabling was properly configured - so you don't have to worry about that.
Anyway, I shut it down and attempted to do a clone using Symantec Ghost 2002 (the only version I have). Synamtec said that the drive contained errors - no big surprise.
So I told enabled CRC32 Ignore and Force Cloning, and tried again. This time it recognized the errors in the bar along the bottom but allowed me to continue to chose my destination drive. This is where it gets really strange.
Synamtec reported the source and destination drives to be of identitical size - 120gb, but whenever I finished with the source/destination selection it prompted me with this error:
"The destination drive is too small."

OK, fine. So I went and grabbed a 200Gb drive - should be plenty of room for a 120Gb drive right? Apparently not. I got the same exact error. Figuring it was a motherboard error - since the particular motherboard was not one we really trusted, I tried it on another machine. Same error. So far I have not been able to make ghost recognize the 200Gb drive as sufficiently large enough to clone a 120gb drive.

The reason I was trying to clone the drive was so that (a) I have a working backup of the drive because it contains extremely important information that belongs to the customer, and because I wanted to see if perhaps the cloned drive would be workable enough for some program to recover it - perhaps just a lemon drive.

If anyone has any suggestions of (preferably free) software that will perform a miracle and save this poor guys data, or some procedure I'm not aware of that I could follow to save his drive, I would be very very happy to hear them. I'm open to suggestions!

Thanks for your time...

 

[rocketPack]

Okay, additional information reported from Synamtec ghost on what exactly is wrong with the drive...

This is the actual error it gives when trying to read:
"Bad block(s) encountered on read: 0x1, drive:128, 1 sectors starting from absolute sector 1869771365"

I hope that is helpful...

I hooked it up as secondary master on my machine and XP tried to scandisk it (said it was FAT32) but could not successfully scandisk it. After i got into windows each mouse click took about 2 minutes to register, and I eventually got to my computer where i tried to access the drive (it showed up in the drive list) but it said there was a corruption or something, and then I tried to right click which took a while, and I tried scandisk from windows but the program would just sit there for a moment, apparently idle (after i clicked start), and it would not show any progress and then it would close without any messages/warnings. Right now i'm going to try the maxtor utlities, but I know they'll be useless.

 

[Maetryx]

Did you try Maxtor's diagnostic software? It might be called MaxBlast or something, but it should be available on their website.

 

[daniel49]

try this and see if you get any useful information.
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...oads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=22

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I've used Ghost 2003 to do something similar, make sure that you use the "-fro" switch, to continue even in the presence of bad/unreadable sectors (ignore them). You might also have issues with the block-mode/count for the drive. Normally, data is read from the disk in groups of sectors, and if one of them is defective, the disk-read (at least in terms of BIOS calls) will fail as a whole. I forget if Ghost is smart enough to back-off and start doing single-sector/non-block reads, or if I had to disable block reads for that drive in the BIOS. I also suggest cloning using a "raw" or "forensic" image mode, in the presence of bad sector, and then do data-recovery work on the cloned copy once its done. YYMV, but if a directory contains a bad sector, I've sometimes found it easier to repair manually. (Again, working on the cloned drive, not the original one.)

The worst is when the drive's firmware itself goes into bye-bye land when it encounters a particular sort of bad sector. (Bad sector-ID/index/servo mark, perhaps?) I had a connot 1.2GB HD (with a firmware marked "bet" on it, handwritten, probably a beta firmware...), trying to access certain bad sector would cause the drive to spin-down (after a couple of re-read retries), and the host software couldn't really do anything about it. It wouldn't spin-up again until a power-cycle.

But for most (and more modern drives), using Ghost 2003, with the -fro / "continue on error", using a forensic sector-by-sector imaging/cloning mode, is probably your best bet. Make sure that the drive has adaquate cooling during the procedure too, don't want to kill it before the data can all be sucessfully read off by making it overheat. I've done this procedure sucessfully several times, along with additional manual data-recovery, to save a client's data.

Edit: Btw, you know that WD drives require no jumper, for "Single" mode, right?

 

[rocketPack]

Hello,

Unfourtinately I only have access to Ghost 2002.
I've been looking around for data recovery programs and I've found several that have been able to read the FAT, but they all require registration to either recover data or repair problems. I think the bad block/sector involves part of the partition table because the type, name, and size of the partition is not readable by basic software (ie. windows). I am not an expert though so i could just be blowing it out my... well you get the idea.
I attempted the Force Cloning (ignore errors) mode but like i said, despite having a drive that is 80Gb larger than the source, it tells me "destination drive too small". This error occurs right after I select the destination drive; it doesn't even let me specify the partition information, just errors out right after I select the source & destination.

Does anyone know of any FREE data recovery tools that work? Or sector-by-sector cloning tools besides ghost? I've tried about 4 or 5 programs and they've all recognized problems and been capable of fixing them, they just wont, so I know that it's nothing extremely unrecoverable, I just need access to the resources! I appreciate all your help so far.

I was trying to save the maxtor "tools" for last as they are rather.... lame. I will see what I can get out of them after this program finishes its work, which will most likely end with "We can fix it for $100 a gig" like the other stupid programs. I don't have $4000 to spend on data! Anyway...

By the way, I do know the jumper settings for WD drives - that's all we use in the computer store/repair shop I work at.

 

[montag451]

Spinrite6 is an honest recovery software app.
Will cost you some $£ but not that expensive considering the price.