Maxtor drive vanished off my system!

[tunsarod]

Last week I installed a new 20gig Maxtor drive as a slave. I used a program called Drive2Drive to partition the little beastie and copied all my most important stuff from my overcrowded 2gb Primary. Next, seeing that all was tickety-boo I happily deleted all the copied stuff off the primary to give it "room to breathe".

Yesterday the computer suddenly froze during active service and I was forced to switch off and on again.

I was immediately greeted by a strange intermittent buzz from the internal speaker. Not unlike a British public telephone ringing tone , brr brr, brr brr, with about 2 minutes gap between successive brr brr, etc. You get the picture.

Checking the system I find that there is no trace of the new hard drive at all, anywhere. Furthermore the system drive configuration is returned exactly to how it was before the new hard-drive was installed and partitioned. i.e. My primary is still C:, the CDRom is back to D: and the CDWriter is E: again.

On switch on the system starts the boot then hangs for about 2 to 3 minutes with just the ocassional brr, brr from the speaker, after which it carries on the start up process.

If I disconnect the data cable from the new drive then there's no brr,brr from the speaker and the system starts up just as it did before I ever installed the new drive - except of course all the data I deleted from the primary drive has not miraculously reappeared on the primary. (Not that I really expected it would.)

So to summarise: the drive is quiet, no motor spin as far as I can tell. I held it in my hand (suitablly earthed) to see if I could detect any gyro sensation - nothing. The system configuration is exactly as it was originally, so The drive is not recognised. And with the drive connected the auto-detect program for new Plug and Play devices does not detect the drive at all.

My gut feeling is that the drive's on-board controller has failed. If it was the physical drive then my system would see the disk but report some kind of failure to access data. If I am right then my only hope is too obtain a replacement board, if at all possible.

Any ideas people or can anyone confirm my conclusions.

For your info: the drive is MAXTOR model: 28020H1 made in Singapore, broken in England.

Rod

 

[Grenage]

Your analysis seems fair enough, if the drive isn't spinning up at all it could well be the controller card on the drive.

It is perfectly normal for CD drive letters to move back once a hard drive has been removed.

 

[edfair]

Your analysis is fine. Your HD has gone away.

And now you see the need to have multiple backups. Either that or some of your valuable stuff isn't as valuable as you claim.

You have to approach computers as fragile beasts that are subject to failure at any moment. They aren't of course, but when they fail like this and lose your data, it feels that way.

This isn't meant as preaching to you, you are suffering enough. This is for the 90% of the rest of the people who read this and haven't prepared for the same type of failure. I hope that some of them learn from your loss. Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[tunsarod]

Your quite right of course but the irony of it is that its over a year since I bought the drive so not only has the drive gone West but so has the warranty!

As drives get ever bigger the problem of backup storage also gets bigger. A half filled 20gb drive is no joke to backup on floppies. (no that was a joke) Actually even backing up to a CD Writer is pretty time consuming. Therefore I plan to purchase two 20gb drives and keep one as a mirror. I used to think that was an excessive approach but not anymore.

Point of interest I did find soom useful info at Maxtor.com and free download software to thoroughly examine the drive but it won't help me. I'm off to scour the net for a second hand unit to canibalise for the board. You never know I might get lucky...

Rod

 

[edfair]

Actually, floppies are better than nothing. But it requires a discipline to set the machine up in such a way that the data is segregated and there is a cost in time for the setup and the running with that setup. Zips are better but still require the discipline.

Have you considered a parallel machine rather than a parallel drive? But in either case you need to think about a backup for offsite.

I currently use ZIP disks for mine but have the capability of CD so that will eventuallly be the way I go.

Good luck on the search and recovery. Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[mudskipper]

tunsarod -- I agree that your troubleshooting was very good. Sounds like a bad drive to me.

However, just for the sake of being thorough, did you try a different power lead from the power supply? I admit that I don't think that this would cause the "brr brr" problem, but stranger things have happened.

Once had a bad power tap cause a computer to not POST at all. Turned out, in that case, that the 12v wire had pulled out just enough to make a very bad intermittant connection with the drive (basically, alternating between connection & no connection very fast). Freaked the whole machine out!

Also saw a computer that had fan wired up to a power tap that, in turn, went into a hard drive, when the fan died, the hard drive appeared bad.

Oddball problems, I admit--but you just never know.... Mudskipper
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