Did Maxtor have a bad run of 200gig drives? 2 out of 2 have died.

[Capt Fiero]

Best Buy had a sale on Retail packaged Maxtor 200gig IDE drives. 79 bucks. This was about a year ago. It was a heck of a good deal. So I grabbed 2 of them and tossed them into my Media Server. I moved my entire Movie collection onto one and my MP3 collection onto the other.

48hrs go buy and the 1st one craps out. I loose 150+ gig of Movies. I rant and rave a bit, but take it back and they give me a new one.

Now today, the other one just crapped out. 160gig of MP3's out the window. FRACK. I have masters of everything and backups on DVDs but man it is going to take a long time to put everything back onto the drives.

So anyone else have a 200gig Maxtor Retail from about a year ago up and die on them.

I am about to just say to heck with Maxtor's all together. At one time that was all I ever used. Now I am a bit concerned.

 

[Drinkyoghurt]

think so, 5 out of 5 have died with me, their maxline III is working fine though

 

[Capt Fiero]

I wonder if it is illeagle to download music that you already own. LOL. Probably faster to just go find discographies that I own and set them to download overnight. I have a 10mb cable connection. With 100gig per month transfer limits.

 

[telexen]

I wonder if it is illeagle to download music that you already own.

Really no, but technically it can still be. It would still be faster to just rip the CDs if you have them.

 

[Xtreme Barton]

.... It would still be faster to just rip the CDs if you have them...

bingo !!

 

[endersbean3k1]

Faster, if you have the time to sit there and change CDs every few minutes. It's still probably your best option though, ensures you have the full version and whatnot.

 

[Capt Fiero]

Faster is negligible. (sp) I have a 10mb line coming into my house.

I got caught up in other business and had to leave this one alone for the past week. I am just getting back to the drive tonight. I am going to download the Maxtor tools and see what errors it comes up with. I dropped the drive into my main rig in a slim hope that it would come alive in better machine and starting from cold. No dice. It just shows up as a raw drive and keeps asking me to format it. Frigging nice. I remembered later that my I had made some DVD MP3 disc's for my fiancées car. (her car plays DVD MP3 disc's) so she has 20 or 30 gig of my music on 5 DVDs. That will give me a decent head start on re-ripping my audio tracks. I am really getting fed up with Maxtor though. I don't really have an option. I am going to have to send it in for warranty and they will just send me another drive. Maybe I could sell it, but probably not enough to buy a better WD drive.

Anyone know any free data recovery apps. Don't want to spend any real money on it. Just want to see if maybe there is an easy way. 160gig in MP3's can't just disappear its got to be on there someplace. If not I guess its time to start swapping CD's.

 

[Capt Fiero]

Update and some good news.


Well on the recommendation of another Fiero owner that I called, he's another computer geek. He recommended Ontrack data recovery. Neat little 30mb app. I installed it, it found the drive, found what seems to be all my files, including some that I had deleted. Let me look over all the files and even organized them into folders for MP3, wav, avi, and so on. The only bad thing is that it is going to put ALL the MP3's in a single folder. It is also naming each older, file1.originalname.mp3 file2.originalname.mp3 and so on. So much for nice organized folders. I am guessing that the directory table bit the big one. It took 2hrs to scan the drive and says it will take about 6hrs to copy all the data off.

I wonder if I am tempting fate taking the files from the bad Maxtor and moving them to my OS drive that just happens to be another Maxtor. Fortunately the OS drive is a newer SATA drive. With a totally different model than the 2 that have crapped out.