Dead Maxtor hard drive

[Pepper]

Well this weekend I have the in-law's computer on the bench for repair. It appears their hard drive has problems, it's a Maxtor 92048D8 (20GB). Of course they have no backups. The drive was making some noise, and had been working for the most part but occasionally the system would lock up. I tried to ghost the data to another drive but this locked up during the copy and now the drive will not spin at all. Do I have any options here?

 

[StevenD]

You can always send it out to DriveSavers or someone like that. However, its really gonna cost ya.

And in the future...stay away from Maxtor!

 

[Pepper]

whoa... got lucky! After letting the drive sit unpowered for 2 days I tried ghost again. This time I got a complete copy to the replacement drive.

Now I'm getting a blue screen because I had to switch to a different motherboard that would recognize the new 80GB drive. I think I know the fix for that one though, boot to recovery console from XP install cdrom and disable the IDE drivers, which should force the generic MS drivers to load instead of the chipset-specific ones that were installed originally.

So... who makes reliable drives these days? At one point Maxtor was my brand of choice because I had a lot of experience with WD and Seagate drives dying. The old 20GB drive I'm replacing lasted seven years.

 

[dfergie]

I've had better luck with Seagates than Maxtors...

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Throw it in your FREEZER for a night.

Try using it the next morning and you might be able to get all the data you need off of it.

This is actually what a lot of these data recovery places try first.

 

[StevenD]

For standard 3.5" IDE or SATA, I only buy Seagate. They all come with a 5-year warranty. Just make sure you stay away from the "7200.8" series drives. They had a bunch of problems with those.

For server class drives, that's a whole other story.

 

[Pepper]

Throw it in your FREEZER for a night.

Try using it the next morning and you might be able to get all the data you need off of it.

This is actually what a lot of these data recovery places try first.

Great tip which I shall try next time, as I already got lucky with this one. I figured the mechanism was overheating which was why it quit working earlier, thus leaving it off a couple of days allowed me to try again. Freezing would probably make an overheating motor last a bit longer during a data retrieval session.

Speaking of the freezer, I need to look at building a shelf in there for my ViP622 if I can figure how to run the video & audio that far. Maybe a small freezer unit next to the entertainment center for storage of drinks and DVRs.

 

[JamesJ]

alright how about this one, I have a 120 gig hard drive, that for some reason the whole computer stopped working (power but not even a bios boot, which makes me believe something shorted in the board itself) anyways, I yank the hard drive try to get all the wifes digital pictures off of it with a usb drive reader, anyways it reads the drive info (serial , size all that good stuff) but wont let me in it to get the information, just like it cant read it. I have the drive set to master which you are suppose to for the usb drive readers, but nothing, anyone got any suggestions?

 

[StevenD]

alright how about this one, I have a 120 gig hard drive, that for some reason the whole computer stopped working (power but not even a bios boot, which makes me believe something shorted in the board itself) anyways, I yank the hard drive try to get all the wifes digital pictures off of it with a usb drive reader, anyways it reads the drive info (serial , size all that good stuff) but wont let me in it to get the information, just like it cant read it. I have the drive set to master which you are suppose to for the usb drive readers, but nothing, anyone got any suggestions?

What is the format of the drive...FAT, FAT32 or NTFS? What is the OS you are using?

You cant open an NTFS formatted drive in an older OS like Windows 98 or ME.

 

[vurbano]

Maxtor = Hot and noisy IMO. No more Maxtor for me. I am constantly wondering when the ones I have are going to die. 4 WD drives are performing excellent in my INfrant server. 2 - 250 gig Samsungs perforing fine in my HDtivo too.

 

[JamesJ]

What is the format of the drive...FAT, FAT32 or NTFS? What is the OS you are using?

You cant open an NTFS formatted drive in an older OS like Windows 98 or ME.

NTFS and I have windows xp home edition, also the drive has xp home on it as well.

 

[Pepper]

Ah.. NTFS drives formatted by different machines. Check computer managment, disk manager. That drive probably shows as a "foreign partition" which you can import.

 

[JamesJ]

went to disk manager, shows me the drive, and the usb hard drive hub or whatever its called is plug and play I had a master and a slave on my old machine, the master is the one giving me fits, the slave, plugged in and I got the info off of it, the master knows something is there, but dosent assign a drive letter I will keep trying!