Ok Tom,
I had the misfortune to buy a Lacie drive 2-3 years ago with a FW800 interface and 2x Maxtor drives inside. BTW Maxtor drives are almost guaranteed to fail in an unfeasibly short time span!! They did this to me.
I took them out of the FW800 enclosure (no cooling) and had them hooked up to my PC in enclosures with SATA/USB bridgeboard. Both drives failed after I'd only had them a few months!! Files were giving CRC errors, or were not readable. I could hear a lot of clicking from one of the drive. That generally means that an area of the disk is damaged so the drive head gets stuck at that point trying to read the data.
The way I am going with this is that I think the MBR (master boot record) of the dodgy Maxtor drive is not fully accessible to Windows (or another part of the NTFS meta data tables). Hence Windows get stuck accessing the drive and won't boot.
I would recommend downloading a copy of
Ubuntu 8.10 (32-bit) Desktop (a common GNU/Linux distro). You can live boot into this CD and it will run in the RAM of your machine. This will let you determine whether it can access the dodgy drive. There is a whole page on the Ubuntu documentation about
data recovery.
I would highly recommend buying a copy of
Spinrite (from
www.grc.com. This software will attempt to go over the whole surface of a HD and boost the magnetic strength of every recorded bit of data on the disk. For corrupted HDs Spinrite will work of damaged areas of the disk and attempt to recover all the data and in the process also restrengthen the magnetic alignment (North-South pole) of all the cells on the HD. Great stuff - every home should have one!! Only downside is it boots of FreeDOS which provides s*** hardware support. Hopefully you have a "beaten up" older rig that won't pose a problem though!! BTW you can burn it to a CD to boot from that (OK that's important to me as I don't have a floppy drive!!)
Spinrite is also a useful tool for maintaining HDs at peak operating efficiency. By strengthening the magnetic alignment of each bit on the HD the result is that you are less likely to surface cosmic ray data corruption, etc. I should point out that HDs actually suffer bit corruption all the time (cosmic rays, natural radiation, etc.) but most of the time the error correction routines in the HD firmware are able to mask this problem from the user. Also the
SMART program code, in the HD FW, will shunt unreadable/unwriteable blocks out of the pool available to the OS for data storage. Spinrite bypasses this mechanism and can recover these areas of the disk as well.
On the subject of SMART. Linux has some brilliant tools for collecting the SMART data of HDs which blow any of the Windows based tools totally out of the water!! They will allow you to run short or extended tests to determine the deterioration in a drive (various standard error types recorded by the SMART code in the drive). I can talk you through using these (from the Live Boot Linux CD) if you are interested!! (Very useful knowledge to have I should add!!)
Just get back to me when you get stuck (which I am sure you will!!)
Bob
