Maxtor 160G drive fails, recovery options?

[EddyB]

Well this recent purchase of my second Maxtor drive has sealed the companies fate with me. My first Maxtor drive was a 2Gig that after 6 months the bearing went south and the drive was louder than a washing machine. The drive which I currently purchased was a 160G 7200RPM and 8M Cache, sounded great on paper. Got the drive created 3 NTFS partitions using the included Maxtor software. I burned the drive in for a couple weeks, copied data to it and ran utils scandisc Diskeeper Defrag etc.. Things looked good so I moved the rest of my data over to the drive, then performed defrags on the original drives.

I left my computer on overnight and when I came the the PC the next morning I heard the drive clicking and there was a Windows error message saying the drive did not respond from to a wake up signal. I dont know how long the heads were clicking either. I rebooted the computer and the Maxtor continued to click and not post. So this is a hardware failure but nothing happened to the 2 other drives in my PC.

Without having the drive able to post now I have no software options to recover my data. There is about 60 gig of data on the drive about 10 gig is very important to me, my music that my band is working on, and photos from my Digital Camera. Some of the Data is backed up of course but not the 2 recent songs my band is working on.

A couple questions for the Gurus:

Has anyone ever dealt with HD Data Recover companies?
If so what would I expect to pay for services rendered?

Does Maxtor have anyway of recovering my Data and sending it back to me?

Ed

 

[ski]

They're expensive.
You're probably looking at a few hundred $ minimum.

 

[bcastner]

Download from Maxtor their diagnostic disk, (it creates a bootable floppy disk) and boot from the floppy to run the utility.

It may be that the third test, a non-destructive re-certification, may let you boot and read the drive so that you can back it up. Be sure to write down any error messages. Maxtor is good about RMA returns.

 

[EddyB]

The utility will not help. The drive is so whacked that it hangs the IDE controller its on rendering the other device (CDRW) to not be seen by the bios as well.

The drives heads are clicking and almost sound like they were locked and will not released.

I'm on hold with Maxtor right now 20 minutes, I dont have much hope for them to be able to solve my problem but I need to call them to state my displeasure in their products and rant to a manager.

If the cost for data recovery is around $400 it may be worth it just to recover all the material that I have recently recorded with the band. I wonder if there is some type of tax write off for that.

Ed