my Maxtor Crashed any ideas to recover?

[farhananwar]

i bought a Maxtor 20 gb about 2 yrs from now. it worked fine until just after its warranty period, it became slow and caused lockups while the hdd light kept blinking constantly. last night my system suddenly got restarted and it showed my hdd name in startup as MAXTOR ATHENA...WTF is that? followed by a changed serial or id number. the bios shows correct hdd space but my system gives a message "PRIMARY HDD FAIL".
ANY SUGGESTIONS...PLZ HELP I HAVE IMPORTANT DATA ON IT

 

[Flinx]

1st take this disk offline.
You may have a chance or two of getting it up but not too likely or for too long.

Get yourself another disk and build your OS.
Maybe get yourself some disk managament tools.
When your up and running your ready to try the old disk.

Attach the screwy disk as a slave or secondary master,
Know what you are doing with jumpers on the drives!

If you get lucky and the drives comes up among a bunch of
attempts, copy your data to the new drive.
---------------------------------------------------------
If you have a couple of thousand to spend you can send it to professionals to get the data off (and if it's really worth it).
---------------------------------------------------------
If the disk drive cannot be seen at all then software cannot help!!! But anyway here are some tools (long shots)

<A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm" target="_new">powermax</A>
<A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm" target="_new">maxblast</A>

If you or a friend have Partition Magic that might become helpful at some point.

====================================================
Couple of questions for my own curiosity.

1)Is the computer room hotter than usual?
2) Did the disk drive start to make sounds before failure?
.....If so what kind? Grinding? Pinging?
3) Did you recently add any components to your computer?
.....If you did what is your present power supply.

==========================================================

The loving are the daring!

 

[Toejam31]

It might be possible to retrieve a certain amount of the files after a second hard drive is installed, partitioned, formatted, and set up with at least one temporary folder for the file transfer ... <i>if</i> you can boot to DOS with a Windows bootdisk and run the <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm" target="_new">xcopy</A> command on any visible files or folders, even if they cannot be seen or accessed within Windows.

However, in my experience, this really only works if the files in question are in a partition on the drive that is separate from the primary partition. And how accessible those files might be depends on the length of time after the initial crash.

Sometimes sharply tapping the drive on the side, and/or wrapping the drive in a couple of airtight freezer bags (to avoid condensation) and leaving it in the freezer overnight will give you a longer amount of time to access the files, even from within Windows. But mind you, I'm talking about closer to twenty minutes, not hours or days.

If this doesn't work, you are either looking at attempting to retrieve the data with a third-party utility such as <A HREF="http://www.ontrack.com/software/" target="_new">EasyRecovery</A>, which may give you mixed results, at best ... or relying on an expensive data recovery process.

None of this is foolproof, so don't expect miracles.

BTW, I may be preaching to the choir at this point, but wouldn't it have been a nice thing if your data had been backed up and stored somewhere in a safe place? Might I suggest an investment in a program like <A HREF="http://www.nextag.com/PowerQuest_DRIVE_IMAGE_2002~4260651z0znzzz1zzdrive_image_2002zmainz2-htm" target="_new">Drive Image 2002</A> to circumvent possible disasters in the future? Unfortunately, it can't help you now, but as long as you are going to use a computer that has devices containing mechanical parts subject to failure ... due to heat, electrical problems, or simple wear and tear, protecting your data is an important issue. You just never know when a problem might occur, and when it happens (not <i>if</i>), it's usually either too late or too expensive to do anything productive except wave goodbye to your treasured files and nurse your depression with a cold one.

I wish you the best of luck, and hopefully, you'll be able to salvage your data with a minimum of expense.

Toey

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[farhananwar]

first thnx for really cool advice, i hav bought a new hdd that is Seagate Barracuda IV 60.0 GB and now i m going to try wht u hav said..i hav had given my screwed hdd to a friend for possible recovery (goting to get it back) but no use..the hdd is detected by the BIOS quite normally as it was before but as the system booting process proceeds it gives the same message "Pri. Disk Fail" or if i put it on secondary "Sec. Disk Fail".

But now trying the same thing with new hdd as pri. and prev. as sec. and running maxblast and powermax lets see wht goes!

For ur curiosity,
I m usin 1200 Mhz Athlon with Gigabyte 7dxe
256 m ram (recently added a 128 M stick)
235 Watt PSU.(i know its quite low)
Room is airconditioned so no chance of over-heatin, my system case usually remains open also.
there was no sound of grindin or else..it was running perfectly fine just a little slow from normal..and in just a flash my system restarted and i got the failure message.
Thats the whole story hope u hav a better advice..
Tell ya when i come up with some new thing..

 

[Flinx]

Have you tried Toejam's freezer trick? People have come back to say that it has worked and they have saved their data.

Run memtest86 <A HREF="http://www.memtest86.com/" target="_new">http://www.memtest86.com/</A>
Try removing the new memory 128MB ram=8 watts of power.
It could be a bit faulty too.

Can you borrow a bigger powersupply from ur friend or is the one ur using propietary like on a Dell or something?

Unplug any unnecessary cards etc to try and get a minimum system up. If works add one piece at a time till failure.

Move the mobo and other stuff over to ur friends case?


Good Luck!

The loving are the daring!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Flinx on 08/17/03 00:27 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Bummer.
Unfortunately sometimes drives just die. :frown:
Sometimes they give warning noises or performance slowdowns... Other times they just crash.

Which is why we allways preach. "Do a backup".

And with yours the drive running slow could have been it trying to read over and over.
Drives slowing down a tad due to file fragmentation is perfectly normal.
But a sudden slowdown is invaribly bad news.

<b>My Car comes with Hyper Threading enabled:
1970 General Motors Holden HT Kingswood Wagon
Regards,
Mr no integrity coward.</b>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Bummer.
Unfortunately sometimes drives just die. :frown:
Sometimes they give warning noises or performance slowdowns... Other times they just crash.

Which is why we allways preach. "Do a backup".

And with yours the drive running slow could have been it trying to read over and over.
Drives slowing down a tad due to file fragmentation is perfectly normal.
But a sudden slowdown is invaribly bad news.

<b>My Car comes with Hyper Threading enabled:
1970 General Motors Holden HT Kingswood Wagon
Regards,
Mr no integrity coward.</b>

 

[farhananwar]

i hav tried with maxblast and powermax3 but no use it doesn't detect the hdd(maxtor) but detects my new one(seagate)...all is lost i think now i hav to try the COOL FREEZER TRICK, although i connected the drive with 350 watt psu of my cousin's computer(same configuration as mine) but no use the same failure message..well lets try the cool trick..
thnx man