Problem with accessing hard drive in windows

[Storm]

Hi All,

I've got a prob with my Maxtor 6L250S0 (DiamondMax 10 family).

I bought it back in November from company M lets call them. Anyways it was fine for months then during some work my data hard drive (I've two of these Maxtors) lost power. I opened the case and saw the power connector was cracked and had come loose. (I suppose I've bumped it over the months and its come loose).

Anyways I bought another SATA power connector which worked fine, but everytime I booted my PC up from then on I'd get the 'one of your drives needs checking' blue screen and I'd either let it check it and find nowt wrong or I'd press a key to bypass it. Since this power outage issue I've never been able to defrag this hard drive, cause it would always say the drive was scheduled for a scandisk.

Today when I booted my PC, after months or this situation, I can't access my data drive.
It's listen in windows explorer but doesn't say the size. If I click it I get a message 'F':\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.' :0

This hard drive is detected in the bios and also device manager doesn't think it has a problem, and its listed in the Disk Management windows tool as Healthy, it says its correct size too.

Anyone got any ideas ? Apart from it being (insert swear word).

I did do a backup of it 11th june but I'm still gonna lose nearly 2 weeks of work which I'd rather not do.

I downloaded a tool from Maxtors website but I think it doesn't like my motherboard so I'll have to try it in a PC in work.

Damn hard drive.

Thanks for any help,
Storm

 

[SiriusB]

Seems to me like something nasty happened when it lost power. It could simply be some stuffed sectors and it can't seem to sort itself out, or it could be much worse.

I don't want to kick you while you're down but you really should have done a full backup of your drive the moment it started acting up and you should have not used it at all after backing up.

However, that aside all might not be lost. Assuming you can get PowerMax to run it may be able to diagnose and repair any problems it finds. If not it might be RMA time!

Before you RMA it I would suggest finding a file recovery program. Unfortunately I don't know what software is currently doing the rounds so I would either Google it, use the forum search or wait for the next guy to reply

SiriusB

 

[Storm]

Cheers for the reply.

I got PowerMax running from another PC with this one connected to it. It passed all the tests fine. hmmm..

I forgot to say the hard drive was part of a whole PC purchased. On their terms and conditions for their warranty returns it says by sending the PC back for repair I'm authorising them to do whatever is necessary to fix the problem, including wiping my hard drive without asking me first, doh!!!

I'll email them and Maxtor none the less. Fingers crossed its a stupid windows thing, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Ta anyways,
Storm