My Maxtor just died... need some info.

I'm using (was using) a Maxtor HDD for a backup drive and 3 days ago, it died.
I got 3 errors from Partition Magic 8.0: #701, #1500, #102. PM8 refused to fix the drive. When in windows, my HD light stayed on. I tried 3 different recovery programs and none of them seen the drive. Things were looking bad. I then figured I would try Spinrite 5.0. Spinrite seemed to lock up trying to just get the info on the drive. Then I rebooted and noticed that my BIOS wasn't seeing the drive! Now things look hopeless. I shut my computer down and replugged the HD data and power cables. Booted again and now BIOS seen the HD again! Then lost it again

Will I be better off sending the drive out to Ontrack Recovery or just get an RMA from Maxtor? I'm afraid they might have to remove the platters if things are really bad. Also, there is no garantee that anything useful could be salvaged, so I would hate to lose my RMA. All my software installations were on it and then some. I should have taken the time to copy everything onto DVDs.

I wonder if this has something to do with my OCZ DDR Booster going bad 2 weeks ago...hmmm

Over clocking can kill a drive so maybe. Have you tried loading winxp's recovery console and running "fixmbr" and then "diskpart". Perhaps only the boot sector is damaged and it can still be fixed. Alternatively, boot with a win98 disk and run "fdisk /mbr" that also fixes the boot sector if it is still writeable. You are sure you don't have a virus? Run TrendMicro's free very good antivirus to be sure.

IT"S WORKING AGAIN WITH NO ERRORS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I shut down the computer, turned my power supply off, waited untill the mobo light turned off, jiggled and pressed on the connectors again, turned it on, went into BIOS. BIOS seen it again!
I then booted into the Recovery Consol (Thank you for info Orion456! ). I typed "D:", just for the heck of it and it went into D: . I proceeded to type "DIR" and I couldn't believe my eyes! I was looking at the drive! I typed "FIXMBR D:", exited into Windows and everything was back to normal!!!!
Any ideas? bad cable maybe?

Might be, either way, back up all vital information pronto. No sense in taking another risk

YAY! Back to the recovery console and do a "chkdsk /r" on the disk. It will perform a complete check and be sure things are ok on the disk surface. It will prolly take over night.

It seems like it was my cable and was related to the DDR Booster. It was a pain to take the motherboard power connector off, when I was removing the Booster, so I had to pull the HDD cable out 1st. I remember tugging on the wires because I couldn't get my fingers around the plug. I had the drive die again, while pulling files off of it. I can't image it because it has cross-linked files and damaged sectors. I thought it was fine at 1st, but Partition Magic is telling me differently. I rather not try to fix the errors because in some situations, I feel it could make things worse. So I have to keep pulling files off manually and hope for the best. I'll have to reformat it again. Time to buy another round cable.

AnomalyX said:

It seems like it was my cable and was related to the DDR Booster. It was a pain to take the motherboard power connector off, when I was removing the Booster, so I had to pull the HDD cable out 1st. I remember tugging on the wires because I couldn't get my fingers around the plug. I had the drive die again, while pulling files off of it. I can't image it because it has cross-linked files and damaged sectors. I thought it was fine at 1st, but Partition Magic is telling me differently. I rather not try to fix the errors because in some situations, I feel it could make things worse. So I have to keep pulling files off manually and hope for the best. I'll have to reformat it again. Time to buy another round cable.

Click to expand...

If it's a NTFS then windows can reconstruct those files and move them to safe places and if it can't it won't muck them. If you just copy them, they might well be corrupted and not useful after being copied.

Thanks again Orion456. Back to the recovery console I go!