Urgent help! Drive seems to be dieing... argh!

[Howard]

Ok about an hour ago I started seeing "Delayed Write Failure" errors appearing and my system just locking up with the HDD light constantly on. I thought it might be my Main System drive (Seagate one) and to be honest it'd be nice if it was that one... Easier to replace.

My system now fails to boot into Windows when the Maxtor one is connected. It just hangs at the black screen after the Windows logo with the HDD light constantly on.

If I unplug the drive it boots fine.

I REALLY DO NOT want to lose all the data on this drive :'( :cry:

Is there ANYTHING I can do to get it back?

I really feel like crying right now... Lol.

[Shogun]

Try it in another pc?

[Howard]

I don't have any PCs that are new enough to accept drives that size

[Steve]

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

PowerMAX.

It could be that the filesystem has gone south on the drive, or it could be the controller flaking out. You might also want to try booting to the recovery console from the XP CD and seeing if you can run chkdsk on the drive.

[Hottentot]

Have you checked your ide cable is working ie try another cable.

Otherwise if its the drive itself you can put it in the freezer for a couple of hours to cool it off. Then reconnect it and if your lucky it might work long enough to transfer the data off.

The last hard drive that went funny on me just required a hard bang edgewise onto my desk to get it working. I wouldn't recommend that though.

[Steve]

Have you checked your ide cable is working ie try another cable.

Otherwise if its the drive itself you can put it in the freezer for a couple of hours to cool it off. Then reconnect it and if your lucky it might work long enough to transfer the data off.

The last hard drive that went funny on me just required a hard bang edgewise onto my desk to get it working. I wouldn't recommend that though.

I would advise against unless as a last resort.

Thus far the symptoms could be from a controller error. The freezer effect is to temporarily alleviate the effects of a physical failure. I had a dodgy cable connection cause delayed write errors once, and also had a dodgy controller board cause the boot failure as described by Howard.

[Howard]

Powermax's basic test said everything was OK The extended test seems to take ages, I'll run it overnight...


ANyone know of any free data recovery software that can be run from a boot disc or any other methods I can get my data back? I don't wanna lose all this stuff

[Howard]

Well I left PowerMax doing a "thorough" examination of the drive overnight and it said there was no problems with the drive! Odd...

Anyway the machine now boots into safe mode and the drive isn't given a drive letter. Good, I can use the machine without it locking up.

I then remembered some software I used to recover data before when I lost my partition info... Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS Recovery. Very good software.

It's now backing up 20GB of music onto my main HDD as we speak. It's rather slow, gonna take quite a while! I've gotta then find somewhere for the rest of the stuff on the drive I want! My server's 120GB drive looks to be a likely candidate...


So I'm gonna RMA this Maxtor. What are Maxtor like with regards RMAing? Quick and efficient? Am I likely to get a larger drive back as a replacement like I read a couple of people on here did?

[turkster]

Good to hear your getting your data back .

It seems odd that the Maxtor software finds nothing wrong with it when OS will barely boot with it.

[Howard]

I'll have more of a fiddle once I get my data back, that way it doesn't matter if I completely kill whatever's on it... Lol

[Knoxville]

Maxtor are very good in regards to RMA'd drives and they do often send back a larger drive from what i've read. Nice to hear someones managed to retrieve they're data though, I've lost 2 hdd's suddenly and i've now learnt my lesson, everything now gets backed up

[Howard]

I am DEFINITELY going to buy an external drive for backup ASAP. What do you use Knox?

[Knoxville]

A combination of a 5400rpm 40gb fireball drive which i plug in every week or so and transfer any stuff i deem essential onto and alot of cd-r's (really gotta get a dvd writer soon though)

[r1zeek]

Aye, I got a 120Gb LaCie Firewire extrenal HDD. Plug it in weekly and make copies of everything that is important to me (school work etc) and I also keep a backup of my important stuff on my fileserver which has saved me more than a few times

[Flash]

So I'm gonna RMA this Maxtor. What are Maxtor like with regards RMAing? Quick and efficient? Am I likely to get a larger drive back as a replacement like I read a couple of people on here did?

They normally take around 3 weeks, they will issue you specific instructions such as what type of box and packaging that the drive needs to be sent in so stock up on cardboard and foam sheets.

[Howard]

Aye, I got a 120Gb LaCie Firewire extrenal HDD. Plug it in weekly and make copies of everything that is important to me (school work etc) and I also keep a backup of my important stuff on my fileserver which has saved me more than a few times

That's exactly what I plan to do, get a 160GB LaCie external drive from Ebuyer and use that.