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My Maxtor Hard Drive Died

A

Aimster

Lifer
I will give someone $5-10 if they can help me fix this problem.

I was defragging my computer and when I came back I saw a black screen that said "harddisk error please reboot".
Now it doesn't even recognize my hard disk. I went to Maxtor's site and I downloaded everything they had, but it doesn't work. My bios doesn't recognize my hard disk either, but on my other computer it does. It still doesn't work on the other comptuer either.

What do I do?
 
put it in the freezer. get the data off it if it works then do a low level format to se if the drive will function again.
 
Oh, yours too? 😀

OK, listen up, if you don't want to wreck you data.

Ready?

NO FREEZER in this case. Stop right there, get your hands off the drive and the freezer door.

If it is not recognized by the BIOS then it is not a mechanical error, then the electronic are broken.

Freezer is for mechanical error and very brute-force and can create mechanical errors. Don't do that.

You can almost certainly recue your data by mounting a new circuit board to your mechnics. You can pay a data rescue service about $350 + the cost of a new harddrive to do this. Or you can get the same model harddrive, get the circuit board off it, mount it to your drive and get the data off. There might be difficulties with revisions but people are doing that all the time.

Oh, and - check your cable first 🙂

Ok, seriously since your error started when using all of the surface and you had one instance of it reporting a bad drive, that sounds like mechanical, and rather typical for new Maxtors I have to say, they often die when you just sweep the whole surface. Does it make unusual sounds?
 
You've done the obvious first-checks, right?
- Reseated both ends of the IDE cable?
- Reseated the power plug at the drive?
- Checked power supply voltages in BIOS?
- Tried another IDE or IDE/ATAPI device , properly jumpered, at the same IDE port and checked that BIOS recognizes it?
- Removed all other IDE devices except HD?
- Force device-recognition in BIOS (if your BIOS allows this)?

Hope this helps!
 
Checked all the obvious. Did everything I could think of and even tried different systems.

so I shouldn't do the freezer thing? I only left it in there for 15 minutes and took it out.

Some programs are able to recognize the harddisk and they are able to scan each sector, but I don't want that. I want to fix my partition because I think it is corrupt.
 
Yes, you surely want to step thru the basics as mentioned above before jumping off the high board. Often your symptoms can be traced to a loose or gimpy power connection.
. And you don't just put the drive in the freezer, you put it in a zip-lock freezer bag first. And hopefully your environment has low humidity as you don't want much in the way of condensation to occur after you take it out of the freezer to test. but only use the freezer trick as a last resort.

My check list would be:
Power connection tight
Voltages at power connection (may be a bad crimp connection somewhere upstream from drive).
Cables
Test other drive in the same position with same connections/cables.
Try your drive in another machine.
SpinRite is an excellent tool and expensive for first-time purchasers, but nothing it can do if the drive isn't recognized in the BIOS etc. Same with any other data recovery tools.
.bh.
 
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