currupt hard drive

I know this is going to sound really stupid, but this worked for me one time. Stick your hard drive in a sealable Ziploc bag, seal it, and put it in the freezer for a day. As soon as you take it out, install it in your box, and try to run it.

Although, your problem sounds more terminal, it sounds as if your Master Boot Record (MBR) is shot. Or have you tried hooking it up to your other controller on your motherboard?

I can bet I'm going to take a lot of flack from the other members for my freezing tact, but I tell you it works sometimes. And the way I looked at it once was since the drive didn't work anyway, what could I lose?

Alright, I'm confused.

Are you getting "Unreadable Drive" message in Maxblast or when you try to boot PC?

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Dalton

is the hard drive making a ticking sound?
if so the armature may be stuck
sometime a 6 inch drop on the edge sometimes releases it.
if you have not done this before be care
you can destory the drive for good.

if so it is dying

before you put in a freeze try using as a second hard drive
sometimes you can get some data off

if the drive is under warranty you can got it replaced,
Maxtor does offer a three year warranty on some drives.
do you get it?

good luck

I've heard of cold data CP, but that answer gave the whole architecture team here at the client a good Friday morning laugh. Oz might have competition for the Yuk of the day!

Use TechRepublic search to look for the article 200 ways to Revive a hard drive that was posted ,there is one suggestion of freezeing the hard drive and installing in a another machine that may help long enough to ghost the image to get the data off,at this point it's worth a try.

You could also try Norton Disk Doctor

System type would be a great help, (you can lie to fat 16/32 file systems, NTFS is trickeere).

BTW - Have retrieved HD/Floppy OS and Data using Debug / Hexedit (very powerful) is god so be careful ! Write to the wrong place and files/data are gone !

Reread your post ! Is the drive using the foppy setup (came with the HD) for LDF (Large Disk Format), maybe using the OEM program for an over 2G disk. This would create a problem using the above tools, Not using a w$ is view only!

FYI - For 2 years have been trying to acces HD with on-board HD controller failure, (would not boot after 16 hours, HD ID failure) yours ID's the HD but says there is no OS leading me to believe the overlay program is corrupted, for large disk support. May be able to reload overlay and retrieve the data. IF it says all data wil be destroyed or will format the HD, back out quickly !

I see some got a chuckle out of freezing the drive. I have done this on numerous occasions with a bad drive. I freeze it, then reinstall it as a slave and immediately pull of any information I can. It does work, until the drive warms up that is.

I fully agree with 2 of the top 50 ways for reviving a drive posted here. Freezing a drive does work sometimes and dropping the drive does too. I have done both to revive drives long enough to get data off of em before they finally quit on me for good. There is a whole book on ways to get a drive working again and yes freezing it is a top 20 answer. If all else fails get the data recovered professionally if u cant afford to lose it.