Insist that Maxtor do the data recovery for you under warrenty. This is
really your best option. I do NOT recommend mucking with do-it-yourself
data recovery at this point. Disconnect it from your computer.
Have you ever had any luck insisting that Maxtor do it under
warranty?
I doubt they will... if he isn't willing to pay for an
(expensive) data recovery service then all that remains is
trying the usual things, jiggling the cables, checking
jumpers, a different cable, a different system, an external
enclosure, a replacement drive PCB (not as likely a
resolution in this case, I would suspect), or the old
freezer-trick, putting drive in airtight baggie and freezing
for an hour before quickly connecting drive (while still
cold) and furiously trying to copy off what data is readable
if the logical filesystem is not too corrupt already. If it
is too corrupt then IF the drive is otherwise somewhat
functional a recovery software might be able to help but
these generally take a long time to run, longer than it
would take for the drive to warm up again.
Also, mapping bad clusers will do nothing to save the files,
if the file has data in the bad cluser you are out of luck
and if you are reading files that aren't in bad clusters,
the bad clusters would have no effect on reading them. IOW,
there is no need to map bad clusters first AFAIK.
