Data Recovery 40Gig Maxtor Help!

[Nottoman]

Maxtor DiamondMax 40GB drive less than a year old and still under warranty.
The drive is spinning fine with no noise associated with it. Does seem a
bit warm, but it is a 7200 RPM drive.
On boot up the BIOS lists it as the slave initially and then says Drive
Failure.
DOS doesn't recognize it.
Used the Maxtor PowerMax utility.
The initial test says it failed the test and to run a scan on the drive.
Then when I run the scan it says the Drive is repaired. Back to the test
and it says fail.
My poor son's got month's of video editing work on it which he hasn't backed
up. It would make his year if I could get some of his work off this before I
send it in for replacement.
Tried the hard drive in the freezer in a Ziploc with no luck.
Outside of surgery, what?

 

[Réjean Dutil]

Put your defective drive as a slave and if you want to use a freeware, you
may try these two software:

1) Drive Rescue 1.9d, freeware (I am not sure if it works with NTFS). I
tried it with success twice.
"Drive Rescue is a freeware Undelete Utility which sadly was
discontinued by the author. The author made a newer version but the
newer version is shareware & has a different name. You can download
the freeware version from
http://www.geocities.com/one_human/programs.html , just look for Drive
Rescue."

2) PC Inspector file recovery: Fat and NTFS, freeware. I never tried it.
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm


Rejean

 

[Etienne Charland]

The best data recovery program I've seen is GetDataBack.

Etienne.

 

[Nottoman]

I've tried a few utilities, but since DOS can't find it and on boot up it
says Drive Failure, the utilities can't find it either.
Will any of these utilities mentioned find it??

 

[Cari]

At this point, your best bet if that data is that important is to try a
professional data recovery company. Be aware they are expensive. I was
quoted over $1500 for an 8.4gb drive a few years ago.

See Maxtor's KB at
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=719

Cari
www.coribright.com

 

[Etienne Charland]

If the drive is physically damaged, then your best bet is to go with a
professional data recovery company.

However, if the drive partitions are damaged, or even deleted, recovery
software will do the trick. On a coupter, we had a FAT32 partition, and
someone accidently flushed the partition to create a Linux partition over
it... over important data! I plugged the hard drive in another computer as a
slave drive, then used GetDataBack (I tried others, but this one is
defenitly the best). It scanned the whole drive and I copied all files I
needed. The only thing I lost is the name of all directories directly in the
root (like "Program Files", "Windows", etc.). Note that even if you write
stuff over the old partition, you'll be able to recover data; but only data
that was not overwritten.

So, since your BIOS detects the drive, it should be correct physically, and
you should be able to recover.

I hope this helps!

Etienne.