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My hard drive died.

L

lil layzie

Gawd
Joined
Jan 7, 2004
Messages
755
*Sigh*
I just got done with a game of Starcraft and exited the game to go chat on AIM. All is well until I hear a strange noise. Well it really wasn't strange because whenever the computer is trying to read the hard drive, you hear it and you also see the activity hdd led blinking. Well yea, the clicks got a little louder and longer then *BAM*, I get a blue screen of death. It said something about Kernal_something, I'm not exactly quite sure. Thinking it was nothing, I pressed the reset button to reboot and while trying to boot, it gave me an error and now my computer won't even recognize that hard drive at all.

My question is, is there anyway to get the computer to recognize the drive?

Right now, I'm on a 2nd hard drive that I just freshly installed Windows XP Pro to get online and get help. My computer will not recognize my hard drive at all. I need to get into it to get some data off and possibly format it so I can RMA it. How would I go about doing that?

Sorry I forgot to mention it's a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120gig 8mb cache hard drive (also in sig).

Help anyone? :(
 
Is the drive getting power? Can you hear it spin up when the computer comes on? Any grinding/chunking sounds? If the drive is seized you could try the freezer trick. If it sounds like it is spinning up and no abnormal sounds, make sure data cables are seated etc. If no dice there you're options for data recovery would be replacing the circuit board with one from an identical drive or a data recovery center :(
 
Thanks for your help.

I forgot to mention that I tried Maxtor's Diagnostic program and it still wouldn't recognize the drive.

Anyways, some good news. I left the drive sitting on my desk overnight, hoping that in the morning when I wake up, it would magically work. Well, my wish came true and while I'm typing this, I'm pulling the files off of the drive onto my external WD drive. Thank God! I hope I get to pull all my files off before the drive dies again.

I think I'm going to go to my local Fry's and pick up a new 80gb WD drive and RMA this Maxtor drive and use it as a storage drive now.

Last question, what's a good program to fully whipe your hard drive? I mean I want to format this hard drive so no one can access it. It doesn't neccessary have to be like CIA or FBI unreadable, I just want your average comp geek not able to access the files on this drive. Any recommendations?
 
BAH
I have one I use at work and for the life of me can't remember the name or where I got it. Sourceforge comes to mind but I can't find it there now :mad: I'll look @ work tommorow and let you know.
 
Appreciate it. Thanks.

I just can't believe my Maxtor just crapped out on me like this. Do you think Maxtor will accept the RMA since my computer can recognize the drive now? I hope so because while pulling files off the drive, I hear strange noises coming from the drive and it gets really really hot to touch.
 
Funny I just read this thread... Im doing a data recovery right now on my storage drive it crashed. Simple just download a program called ( GetDataBack ) and it can recover all your files. Its doing it right now for me as im typing.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. Luckily (as mentioned earlier in one of my posts) my system was able to recognize the hard drive in the morning when I woke up to test it. I just attached my external hard drive to it and started pulling my important files off of it and then tried to format it. This has been an overall bad experience with Maxtor. I mean this could have probably happened to me with WD or even Seagate. Hopefully, I get an RMA going and get a good drive in return.

I also have this 30gig 2mb Seagate hard drive in the system and it has been working with no problems for 2.5+ years and it's still going strong. With that in mind, I went to my local Fry's and now I'm typing this on a new 80gig 8mb Seagate hard drive as I'm downloading my Windows critical updates. :D
 
Yes, sadly it can happen to any hard drive. I have had Maxtor's, WD, and 1 Seagate crap out on me over the years. Don't hate the company because you had 1 drive fail - wait till you have at least 3 then complain ;)

The util I've been using for wiping drives is DBAN. Open source and it uses DoD 5220-22.M standard and Gutmann wipes among others. Not fast, but anything that claims to wipe a disk in 10 minutes is garbage.
 
spectrum said:
Yes, sadly it can happen to any hard drive. I have had Maxtor's, WD, and 1 Seagate crap out on me over the years. Don't hate the company because you had 1 drive fail - wait till you have at least 3 then complain ;)

The util I've been using for wiping drives is DBAN. Open source and it uses DoD 5220-22.M standard and Gutmann wipes among others. Not fast, but anything that claims to wipe a disk in 10 minutes is garbage.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the link. Takes a while but it works.
 
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