HD Lockup

I have a HP Vectra with a 40GB Maxtor HD in addition to the existing HD. The other day, I was saving a DVD to the Maxtor (set up as "master"). Though it was set to warn me before the HD became 90% full, and I did have plenty of space left on the drive, the disk locked up and has not worked since. I have gotten conflicting messages such as "disk not formatted", "disk capacity exceeded", "locked by utility", "read drive error", and "Invalid media type". I'm pretty good w/ this junk, but nothing seems to work. Can anyone help?

Welcome to Windrivers teknowledgeme

First thing to do would be to run the maxtor diagnostics - if you have not got the cd/floppy disk that came with the drive you can download powermax utility here

Run the non destructive tests and see what it says.

It is not entirely clear which hard drive has windows on it. If it is the maxtor then it would be possible to unhook the maxtor and install windows to the original hard drive, then attempt to access the maxtor as a slave to the original hard drive.