dead maxtor

[SilentDeath]

This afternoon my maxtor 120gb 7200rpm 2mb dieeeeeeeeed on me.
This drive was almost full with almost EVERYTHING I have collected over the last three years. That included dvd's (I rip them to hdd and throw away the dvd's, what a shame...), about 20gb of mp3's (cd's go in bin too...), WORK (I NEEEED THIS!!!), and also as bad I have lost my collection of programs, the ones I need for reinstalling, that was suppost to happen next month...

And Ive just remembered, my drivers, I wont be able to get half of them back from the inet, some of the stuf is too old, yet the hardware still usefull.. bugger...

:C

Back to the disk itself. Nothing seems physicly wrong with it. No burn marks, and no recent contact to anything that might possibly contain static.
Also for those that didnt know, theres a buzzer hidden in them somewhere, It was a suprise to me! When the drive dies, it bleeps (wont happen on all dead drives, depends on the bit that died - I think the ocntroler in this case..). Sorta sounds like a mobile ring tone, and for about 5 mins I thought it was a practical joke, or something, using someones phone... then I took the drive out and knew it was dead...

[Shogun]

Try getting another drive of the same model and swop the controller board?

[da_ging]

buy a dvd writer and back up to dvd in future aswell ,saves so much trouble in the long run

[G4Z]

really harsh mate, I can understand how you feel, I would be gutted if my 160 went tits up as it has loads of stuff on it. these days its possible to have so much data that its impractical to back up to cd or even dvd. best think I think would be have a 2nd big disk and have a copy on each disk. I am planning this soon because I have nowt in the way of disaster recovery. This kind of thing can happen even with new drives so if possible its worth spending the extra cash.

unlucky mate, hope you can repair that disk and recover your data.

[turkster]

Thats very bad luck mate

HDDs are a bollox for failing out of the blue. Had that happen to me a few times and it is very annoying indeed. As has been said it is so difficult to back up everything on hardisks these days even with a DVD writer .
Apart from swapping the controller I have no idea what you could do to get it working.

[SilentDeath]

I dont think you will get any ideas of how to get it to work, as earlyer I decided to melt it with a 1300 degree c blow torch, shortly after I finnished soldering some watercooling stuff

I do have a dvd writer but the capacity is too small and makes it impractical. Maybe when blue ray disks appear, but by that time our hdd's will also have got bigger...

[Shogun]

Gah what a shame, you could have gotten that drive to work again. Your loss tho Had better change your sig now

[turkster]

You'll have to make sure you water cool it next time, they are'nt meant to get that hot .

Yeah I dont even have a DVD writer so I just try and back up the stuff that is very important or took a long time to make. Not that I am very good at even doing that . Hope you didnt lose anything too important.

[turkster]

Gah what a shame, you could have gotten that drive to work again.

By changing the controller card? That may not necessarily have fixed and anyway sourcing a working controller would probably have required buying a new hard drive of exactly the same type with the added possibility that you will bork the card by putting it in the dud drive

[Shogun]

Gah, always trying to foil my plans arent you turk grrr

[morlok]

This afternoon my maxtor 120gb 7200rpm 2mb dieeeeeeeeed on me.

My apologies for the late reply, I only recently began reading this web site again.

For you r dead Maxtor I would try several things:

Go to Maxtor's site, and get the utility 'Powermax'. It will try to identify tour problem, and may allow you to retrieve your data.
If the disk is still spinning, try the following utilities:
MBRtool
- will allow you to inspect/repair the MBR on the disk
PT-tool
- to quote:
<snip>
Pt-tool can be used to edit partition tables in MBR and EPBR's on local harddrives and can be used to save the information of such sectors to a file. These files can be sent to a recovery specialist to be edited.
<snip>

ZAR
- Zero Assumption Recovery
The title says it all ;-)

Again, this assumes that the disk is still spinning, and the heads will still seek.

Rotsa ruck,
Bob S

[SilentDeath]

Thanks for the reply but I dont think that will work. The disk doesnt spin, and wont get recognised by the sata controler [using sata converter] (it hangs on the IDE controler). It also does a series of bleeps 5 seconds after power applyed and repeats after about another 5 seconds. I think its compleatly dead.




did I mention I melted it?

[Kezzer]

/me introduces |SilentDeath| to backup

[morlok]

The disk doesnt spin, and wont get recognised by the sata controler [using sata converter] (it hangs on the IDE controler). It also does a series of bleeps 5 seconds after power applyed and repeats after about another 5 seconds. I think its compleatly dead.

did I mention I melted it?

Try it in a different machine. It's always nice to have a testbed lying around for just such a contingency. ;-)
Try removing the SATA converter, you still have an IDE interface there.
Are you saying that the drive itself beeps?
That's a new one.
The beeps have always been generated by the mobo's BIOS, not the components.
Your mobo spec will (should) have the beep codes. You can get them off the internet with a little spelunking at the mfr's site.

What do you mean by 'melted it'?
Your original post says:
<snip>
Back to the disk itself. Nothing seems physicly wrong with it. No burn marks, and no recent contact to anything that might possibly contain static.
<snip>

Faliing that, I'd get back to basics:
Is it plugged in?
(Dont' laugh, I've done that. Problem solved when I realized that I hadn't PLUGGED IT IN!!!!
Are the cable seated. Pull them and reseat them. Reseat the converter board, too
Try new cables.

One of my mantras, developed over the years has become:
It's always the cables/connectors.
You'd be amazed by the veracity of that mantra.

[SilentDeath]

Cba to try in another machine. I have 5 that I could use as a testbed.
tryed on ide, it hangs the machine + bleeps
Yes it bleeps, its a strange bleep, in that its about 10 bleeps of different tones.
Its definatly from the drive.
The mobo doesnt bleep atall, its speaker is not connected, however nothing is heard through headphones - the nf7-s bleeps through both speaker and headphones, when it bleeps.

After getting annoyed I melted it using a blow torch in the garden. aluminuims melting temp is around 600, this flame goes to about 1000c.

It might have died if the sata conenctor was lose, and so disconnected, and then reconnected. When reconnecting it would have blown the drives sata chip as the drive is not suppost to be powered when connected.

[Steve]

That is ungood.

When I get the funds I'm going RAID 5 - and also an external Firewire (because everybody knows it's > USB2) drive for backup.

Luckily at the moment I have a RAID array, a SCSI drive, and a Deathstar, so my data is duplicated a lot - anything that isn't duplicated... I can afford to lose.