No device functioning....again. Please, Please Help

[NADIAZIPPER]

I have a 80GB Maxtor hard drive installed in my pc. It is set to cable select and is the second drive on the cable. I created one 80GB partition and formated it. About a month ago the drive became unaccessible. I could not open it,run scandisk or defrag. When I tried to open it from explorer, it read: D:\is not accessible, A device attached to the system is not functioning. I ended up formating it again and lossing all of the info. Today I received that message again. I was using download accelerator at lunch to download some files, when I came home 5 hours later I had a message saying my drive was full, but when I went to look at it I received that message. I know the drive is not full.
Is there anything I can do to fix this? If not can I get my files off it before I format again. Please,please help

 

[Snickle]

A couple of questions, what operating system and what format is the drive? Hard to answer without knowing the answers.

 

[NADIAZIPPER]

Sorry, forgot those. W98 and it is a FAT32

 

[Snickle]

I missed this part "It is set to cable select and is the second drive on the cable." so I need to ask a couple of questions.

Is the data cable itself a Cable Select type? Is the other drive set for Cable Select/CS? Master on the end plug and Slave in the middle, motherboard at the other end as the cable is marked? Does the BIOS see it properly in AutoDetect, no 32GB limitation?

 

[NADIAZIPPER]

The bios sees it. The other drive is also set to cable select. The drive was working, for at least 3 weeks when this happened, I was able to store and retrive several items. I defraged it a few times and ran scandisk on it, and it worked. I just don't understand how it worked earlier in the day then all of a sudden just died.

 

[ANFPS26]

Here is a good explantion of "cable select":

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

I would try using the drives as master/slave instead of cable select. Cable select requires a special cable and is not used anymore. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....."

 

[NADIAZIPPER]

If my drive has been working for some time, the problem can't be the cable select issue, Right? Besides the first time this happened I set it to master and put it on its own cable and still nothing. Also when I tried to open after it crashed I saw files that weren't there before, with names that were symbols and squares.Since my computer had been on for quite some time I did a normal shut down. Then once it restarted the error started showing up.

 

[Snickle]

Go to Maxtor's web site and download their diagnostic [MaxBlast or PowerMax, names have been changing], print their instructions for using it, and run it. It will give an error code for warranty use if there is a problem.

 

[NADIAZIPPER]

I ran everything except the low level format option and still nothing. All the tests say the drive is working properly. If a hard drive looses it format what has happened?