Maxtor 250gig Problems

[sharkmont]

Hello,
I have a 250 gig PATA Maxtor drive that has recently been giving me a plethora of problems. I am using it as a network share for movie files and it is accessed quite a bit throughout the day. It is NTFS formatted drive with one partition. After a reset one day I am receiving an error about the volume right before getting into Windows XP and chkdsk runs and finds an error or two, but it cannot write to the drive. I was still able to access the drive and thought that maybe it had just not been cleanly shut down.

The next day I boot up again and this time chkdsk finds a ton of problems 'replacing invalid security id' being constantly repeated for many files. And now I have no access to the drive at all. It is detected by the BIOS and Windows, but the partition information and all the files are missing. I was wondering if there is any way to recover all the home movies that are on the hard drive. I know I should have recognized the problem from the get goes, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
sharkmont

[flamerail]

Reconnect it to the ide an power supplie connectors an do a full reformat of it...
I dont think its failing thoe.

[sharkmont]

That's good to hear that it probably isnt failing, however I am really interested in attempting to recover the files on this drive. When the chkdsk starts at boot with the replacing security id, it recognizes the volume name accurately which makes me think that the files still could be on there. I am not sure what is causing this so all help is welcome. Thanks for your help!

[el]

try the utils on the ultimate boot cd 3.3 has the maxblast software on it and many others.

[sharkmont]

Thank you all for your generous help. I was able to resolve the problem by running chkdsk again in Windows and allowing it to complete all the checks and do a full scan and fix. So far it seems to be working alright, but I think I may start backing everything up and do a clean format just in case.

Thank you all again for your help,
sharkmont

[KorbenD]

I ran into a similar problem with my previous PC. My drives started giving errors, and also audibly resetting during use. I was sure that they were failing, and took the cover off the case to get the serial numbers for an RMA.

And then I noticed the Northbridge fan wasn't turning. . .

Replaced the fan, and never had a problem with the drives since. ;)