Maxtor Woe

[harrykh]

Hi,

This morning my hard drive failed. This happened when I was opening my case and remove and old HD (that wasn't connected in any way) from the computer so it doesn't clutter.

I put everything back, hardly touching anything in the process.

I turned on my computer, it boots to windows and it was fine. Then suddenly I got a "Delayed write Error".

I tried going to the "G" drive which one of the partition on my Maxtor Quickview 200G drive. It loads painfully slow but in the end it lists the content, so I decide to turn off the comp and turn it back on.

Now windows only shows one partition on that Maxtor drive and it's labeled "Local Disk". Now I know that can't be good

Went to reboot again, and look in the BIOS and see my HD capacity a whooping 63.x GB!

Nevermind that I may not be able to retreive my Data (which is more important than the HD itself) but does this mean that the HD is kaputt ?

Opening the casing sounds so trivial, I know I didn't touch the IDE cables coz my casing has enough room for my hand to reach places.

I was merely getting an old HD that stopped working, but I never had the..'time' to remove it. I only removed it now coz it's casting a shadow of that neon light that my casing has.

What can I do, it's a whole 200g and it's almost filled with data that you can say I hold dear. Pictures and movies.

Is there any low lvl hd util that I can use or something. BIOS is already reporting incorrect Capacity, it was reporting the correct one before so it's prolly no a BIOS limitation.

My COMP
Windows XP SP2
AthlonXP 2600
KT6 Delta Mobo
512 RAM
1 40 GB PATA Seagatte Baracuda HD for OS and Apps HD.

1 200 GB PATA Maxtor Quickview drive <---the one broken right now. Temporarily I hope.

Quickviews supposed to be the best there is ? I would get seagette but QVs review were enticing.

If it's hopeless, next HD I get is a baracuda! Also should I get SATA drives, my MOBO supports it but I never got enough nerve to get one since I'm used to the IDE bit.

What should I know when I wanna get a SATA drive.

Thanks for any help,

Harii

[jankerson]

Using the Maxtor Tools run tests on the Drive before doing anything else.

[Midknyte]

The Swiss Army knife of diag tools:
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

[harrykh]

Yay, it's fixed thanks for the heads up.

For some reason the max reported LBA is much lower than it should. So I changed it back.

Does this have virus written on it?

Anyway,

Thanks a lot and I'm sure this is not my first, and hasn't been, computer problems )

Thanks again, bye for now

[DanceMan]

Now would be a good time to do that backup we all put off.

[Leoslocks]

It could be a motherboard Bios issue, or a cable issue. I would reseat the cable on that drive as well as the power connector.

[harrykh]

Possibly. I do want to figure it out. Why it happened that is.
Maxblast showed it so...simple.


Max Lba=xxx
Recommended Lba=xxx
Current Lba=less than xxx

I never set any limitation jumpers on it. If it's not Master it's slave.

O well, if anyone have the same problem do try the util

Cheers,
Harii