click...click...click...OMG! 40 gig HD lost, Need advice 1

[mypcsucks]

Yep that happened to me 2 days ago. All of you that guessed that it was a maxtor HD get a cookie. Now I tried to Norton 2003 ghost to move that data to my 200 gig HD that I just bought but my bios could not read my 40 gig.

They question I raise to you ladies and gentlemen is there some software out there or trick to raise this Maxtor from the dead without mortaging my home.

 

[Peahippo]

The internal parts could just be stuck. Take the drive out of your computer entirely, and do the inertial spin. The "inertial spin" means to force the platters inside to spin with respect to the body of the drive. Hold the drive like a card-shark would a deck of cards, and whip it back and forth as quickly as you can manage (people with weak wrists will find this annoying, even painful), rotating at your wrist. After a dozen or so shakes, the platters inside should go through at least 1 revolution.

Put it back into your computer and see if it behaves again. If so, then great ... backup your data immediately and then never trust that drive again for any reason. It might be a good time to try out some drive mirroring (NT had that, so I suppose XP has it too), which would introduce fault tolerance that would allow the drive to be useful if not trusted.

If the inertial spin doesn't fix it, then confirm your jumper settings. Perhaps a jumper fell off when you rummaged in you computer case.

If the settings are OK, then it's time to jump on another computer and surf Maxtor's site for diag software.

 

[Igor106]

IF the mechanics are stuck in the there is a funny but helpful trick. Stick the HDD in the deep freezer for a while. The HDD moving parts use lubricants that get hard dueto using, called aging of the lubricant. When the lubricant gets old, it acts a bit like glue and instead of helping movement, it hinders or even prevents it. When you deep freeze the hdd, the metal parts shrink, and the old lubricant "breaks loose" the axis from the barrings. After an hour or two in the freezer, take the hdd out, keep it at room temperature for about 15 mins ( to prevent due on the electronics) and power it up. It should keep the hdd running for some time, but don't trust that bad boy, as Peahippo said