[geerhed]

My Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 120G hard drive was my primary for several years. Recently, the drive began to chatter and show heat alarms. I was in the process of buying a new HD when it died.

New behavior: Windows would begin to boot up (past logo) and then switch to the black screen "sorry, Windows failed to start for some reason, please try again..." All the variations I could come up with (safe mode start, safe with networking, reset button, F8-to-safe before logo, etc.) all had the same result.

A tech/admin friend mentioned the heat/rattle combo might be heat-related expansion jamming the R/W head. On his advice, I put it in the freezer (!) for a few hours, then hooked it up. Nothing new.

I installed the new HD, and attempted to look at the broken one from there. A window popped up with, "Drive E:/ is not formatted, would you like to format now?"

Some of the important data was not backed up before the crash. I did not want to take the chance of wiping all the data from the HD, so I did not format.

What now?

o Will formatting the drive allow me to access the data?
o Will formatting the drive wipe out all data?
o Are there data recovery tools I might use?
o Is there something I should be doing, but am not?
o Is there something I am doing, but should stop immediately?

Thank you for any help or advice you can give me.

Regards,

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Hmm. I had a Maxtor drive that I think became physically damaged. It couldent be a primary boot drive.
With your case, maybe you should try PowerMAX. Its a piece of software for Maxtor drives that can perform burn in tests, and low level formatting. Try the Burn in tests if you get the program. and see if there are any developements. If the drive fails the test, then it might be physically damaged. There are however programs that can recover data from formats or from an unformatted drive, maybe giveone of them a try.
If you want to retain the date, probibly dont format for the tiem being
Hope to have helped.

[Joshy J]

Hmm. I had a Maxtor drive that I think became physically damaged. It couldent be a primary boot drive.
With your case, maybe you should try PowerMAX. Its a piece of software for Maxtor drives that can perform burn in tests, and low level formatting. Try the Burn in tests if you get the program. and see if there are any developements. If the drive fails the test, then it might be physically damaged. There are however programs that can recover data from formats or from an unformatted drive, maybe giveone of them a try.
If you want to retain the date, probibly dont format for the tiem being
Hope to have helped.

[happyrock]

dont format it..... try spinrite ...its not free but has worked magic on dying drives...read about it and get it here...

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Edited by happyrck, 02 November 2006 - 08:12 PM.