Recovering Data

[Uber]

see another reason not to buy Maxtor.... i had a buddy that just lost an entire 160 gig maxtor, cost over 1500 and he onyl got 78% of it back. he had just formatted his 2 80's too.....

[henbenley]

The drive is semi-dead. Theres no physical damage, and you would think it works until you put it in a computer. It starts to load windows and then it just reboots. And I can see all my files when using knoppix so I know there still there. If LiveDefender doesnt work then I'm going to go buy a pack of 50 cd-r's and start burning.

 

Now I dont know what HD company to go with. Western Digital has failed me and now Maxtor has failed me. I think I'm going back to western digital and getting 2 80gb and backing up one hell of alot than I used to.

 

Do you guys think that once I get my data that I could RMA the drive? I'm hoping that I can, so I can sell it and get some money to pay for my new drives.

 

Its a 120gb drive that died. No wonder they put maxtors on sale so much I got the sucker for less than $20 about 6 months ago.

 

NOTE TO SELF: no matter how cheap the dang maxtor hard drives are dont ever buy them, but you can buy them then ebay them, but you must never use them ever again.

[oralpain]

If you can still get the files off of it what makes you think there is anything wrong with the drive itself? Just sounds like a corrupted windows install to me.

 

If it can be reformatted and used, there is probably nothing wrong with it....

Edited December 24, 2004 by oralpain

[henbenley]

It might just be a windows install, but I'm thinking that theres a little more to it than that because when I put it in my other windows computer as a slave drive the machine ran super slow and wouldnt open the drive so I couldnt read it in windows, but I can read everything in Knoppix.

[berto]

Ive had an experience like this before with my WD 80gb hdd. All i did was use the 3gb hdd i had lying around with Win2000 and nero on it, hooked it up as the master (old hdd as the slave). That way I could boot into windows, see my corrupt 80gb drive and i was able to burn everything to cd-r, even if it went really slow. Thats an easy way to do it usually, and if that works then you dont have to go out and buy new drives or format anything. More than likely your Maxtor has a 1 or 3 year warrenty, therefore you could RMA it. You might be with out access to that one comp for a while, but you would be saving money. If you cant still see the drive in the other windows computer then maybe the freezing trick will work? I havent used it but it might....im sure someone here knows something about it.

 

Or:

You can always borrow another drive that has an NT OS on it and just copy the files into folder there instead of burning. Then when you get a new HDD you can just hook it up to any computer then just copy over to the new drive.

Edited December 26, 2004 by berto

[henbenley]

I've tried hooking it up to my other WinXP Home box and it goes slower than my old 200mhz sucker. Once it actually boots up it sees the drive, but it gives me an error and wont let me view any files or use the drive at all. So I cant do a thing with it in Windows.

 

I tried using Knoppix, but Knoppix cant write to NTFS partitions. I could look and see all my files though and they were all thier and opened fine.

 

Then I tried using LinuxDefender Live! and it wouldnt let me even view either of my drives. It was giving me an error about not having the ntoskrnl.exe. So that didnt work either.

 

I'm going to try the freezing thing next. So if I remember right its freezer for like 30min and then boot up with it right away while its still cold?

 

I just ordered a Western Digital 120gb to replace this. Once I get my data back then I'm going to RMA it and sell it. I've never really liked Maxtor anyway. I got it less than 6 months ago and it has a 3 year warranty on it.

 

Anymore ideas to try??

[airman]

just try a install of windows (without reformatting) if ya can

[henbenley]

just try a install of windows (without reformatting) if ya can

I would do that if I had a disk that would let me. Dell disks make you format. And I lost my other disk.

 

Searched the entire house and havent found it. I think someone might have stolen it.

[TheSternMystic]

Western Digital and Seagate are the best drive IMO

[Sanosuke_Sagara]

you wouldn't have just upgraded to SP2 by any chance?

 

if you just upgraded to SP2 it requires you to change your jumpers on your master to Master, and not just "Cable Deside" or ""Master and Slave Drive" even with a slave drive you have to put it on "Master"

 

SP2 is weird like that, for some reason the only 2 jumper settings that work properly is "Master" alone and then if you have a slave drive you still keep the jumper on master.

 

I know it got me worked up about why all my harddrives was skipping and crashing windows on me.

 

good luck on that.

[henbenley]

I got a western digital that should be arriving in a couple of days.

 

I didnt upgrade to service pack 2 yet, and I really never plan to unless I hear of it working on most peoples computers.

[Sanosuke_Sagara]

its good to just get it because of the support it provides for other things.

 

like ATI and Nvidia drivers they say they require SP2 now.

 

back in the day when SP1 was new, no one got it. but Evendually got it because it gives support to harddrives over 130gigs and also ATI and Nvidia required it, or your DVD decoder wouldn't work. if you used regular XP with out SP1 the DVD decoder would not work and just look like a an old Geforce 4 TI trying to watch a DVD.

 

but its just a suggestion... when a software company says "Required" it ususaly means the driver won't work properly with out it. (don't get me wrong, you may not notice a difference with out such as if you don't watch DVDs.)