CRASHED 20GB Maxtor Drive

The other day, i was transferring data form one drive to the other (from Seagate 40gb to Maxtor 20 gb) when all of a sudden crack pum, crack pum!!!. Some very loud repeated noises came from the Maxtor drive, as if the heads were banging from one side end to the othe. Of course this crashed winxp, and after resetting, Oh surprise!! The drive is f**ked up. I can't see it on the BIOS.
My best guess is that is a mechanichal failure (due to the noises) I've tried it in some other machines, but it is the same thing.
The machine in which this "acident" happened is:

EPoX 6VBA (Via Apollo Pro)
PII300
160MB
Pioneer 115 DVD
Compro SCSI 20X8
Seagate 40GB
Western Digital 10GB
Maxtor 20GB (DECEASED)
BootMagic Pro
OS1: Windows XP Professional (Updated)
OS2: Win98SE

Lucky me, i haven't lost very important stuff. I have most of it on other drives or on cd's, but i can't heelp thinking that i lost US$ 100, which is a lot of money here in Argentina.
My question is... Is there any way to diagnose & repair this drive? I want to know if the problem was with the hard drive itself, or if it something else happened...

Is there any way to recover the information??

Very common failure, becoming more common every day it seems.

There are companies that will take the drive apart and put the platters in another drive to retrieve lost information, but it costs lots of $$$$! Consider your data lost.

I've heard stories of faulty IDE controllers on MB's frying hard drives, but if you've had another drive hooked to it, it's probably just another case of a poorly manufactured hard drive meeting it's unexpected demise. You can check to see if the drive is still under warranty, but other than that there's not much you can do.

*edit* One thing I forgot...If you are able to get the drive to be recognized in the BIOS, you might be able to use a utility like spinrite to retrieve your data.

Dose the drive spin at all? If it dose you could try the freezer trick. This will, if it works, let you get some more data from the drive, but other than that its dead man.




If redness and swelling continue discontinue use and contact your doctor

RMA it, should still be under the 3 year warrenty.

I've used the freezer trick and it bought me enough time to get the data off, but it didn't save it for the long-term.

Assuming you didn't buy the drive in the past couple months, it should be covered by the 3 year warranty. Not sure of turn-around times for Argentina, though...

It would be great if you people can explain a little bit what is the "freezer" trick... I'm already searching for the "spinrite" utility, but if somebody wants to give a lesson...

the spinrite utility is at
www.grc.com

Take the bad drive put it in a static free bag (like the one it came in). Remove as much air as possible. Place the static free bag containing the drive into a plastic bag that you can seal, removing as much air as possible to avoid condensation on the drive. Now place the drive in the freezer for a good ten hours or so. Then as quickly as possible take this chilled drive and install back in the PC. With luck it will spin long enough to get any important data copied off to your other drives. This will only work once and for a short time, once the drive heats up again you have a nice paper weight. Good luck : )




May cause health problems in the elderly.

This Mother fu**er sometimes wants to be detected by the bios, so I'll try freezing its as*, and see what happens...

if the Bios dose not see the drive then the freezer trick will not help as far as i know. If the Pc is off for a long while and has cooled off dose the Bios see the drive or dose the drive try and spin up?

I usually stick to Western Digital, as I have had nothing but good results from them. I had an incident some years ago due to my less than perfect understanding of IDE drives, and a tech from Western Digital stopped by on his way home and solved the problem at noc cost to me. I live within easy driving distance from Western Digital if I have a problem.
Jim

It's a MAXTOR, it's supposed to make that sound..

But seriously, at one time or another all manufactures go through a bad time.

Maxtor and Conner bad times were when they went over 540 MB.. WD had bad times with 4, 5 and 6 GB's.

Then Maxtor and WD had more problems around 10 or 20 GB.

It's not if your drive is going to crash, but when no matter what brand you use.

I saved a customer's data off a 10Gig WD drive a couple years ago. For some strange reason I never figured out, the platters weren't spinning. The drive would get hot enough to cook an egg on.
I unscrewed the top, plugged it back in and booted. The platters twitched. I took my finger and lightly rotated the hub. It spun easily. I did a partition copy to a new drive and the user only noticed the new drive was twice as big. All his data and settings were as before.
The drive wouldn't work after that, so I shelved it for half a year. Then, when desperate, I installed it into a test Server machine. It worked, and has been working like that with the top screwed back on for over a year.

Note: One year I had one Maxtor and one Western Digital get returned in one month. They each stood by thier products. Still, I prefer Maxtor over all others.