Greetings all,

I have a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 8 40GB harddisk that started acting up suddenly. As of yesterday morning, it started showing up as N40P in the device listing, which I understand from googling is caused by corrupted firmware.
I really don't care about (fixing) the harddisk, that is, I plan to bash it with a bat, but is there any way I can recover some important files from it? Would some data recovery software work, if I slaved the Maxtor HD, and perhaps turned it off in the BIOS?
About two years ago, I had trouble with the same Maxtor disk, but it was a different problem, corrupted MBR if I remember correctly. We disabled it the BIOS, enabling WinXP to load. As windows recognized it (but could not open/explore it), data recovery software (Stellar Phoenix) worked. Would this scenario work in this case.
I really don't have the money to pay some data recovery company to do the work, and would really appreciate a response from you people.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

I'm afraid there is no magic that will make your data accessible without special knowledge and tools that DR companies have.
the tools are much more expensive than theese companies and without the knowledge U can easily put your drive in a much worse state than it is now.
Recovery SWs cannot work with this drive in its current state, since it aborts every read command it receives.

regards,
pepe

Thanks pepe,

Yeah, I tried it last night, and no program could access the drive except Powermax, where the drive failed all tests, except the hardware ones (ide connection, jumpers, etc). Powermax couldn't even low level format the drive...
Having read that the problem is most likely caused by firmware, I contacted them for a firmware update or something, but I received no reply...

I did this kind of routine with that particular drives. You have only 2 choices: for doing it yourself you have to buy LICENSED versions of PC3k or Maxtor FW repaire or HRT. Otherwise you have to send it to Data Recovery Company. In both cases you have unfortunately spend some money. Also in my experience even if you successefully upload a firmware
your drive might still not be recoverable. In my last try I had only 30% of data, the rest is corrupted.

U may use hotswap (if U have a similar drive) and make an image of the drive.
But this way U will have shifts in the sector structure that are difficult to compensate.

pepe

Pepe,in this case hot swap does not work - I tried that many times.
Or may be you use some special technique for hot swapping which I don't know?

Hi Vadidaz,

I used hotswap before I got the tools to access FW. It worked in most of the cases.
What was the problem when it didn't work for you?

pepe

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll see what I can do, this weekend, hopefully.

BTW, I ended up calling Maxtor twice, and both times they stressed that it could not be a firmware issue, "not in a million years" they said.
They had really nothing to say when I told them about the number of such cases...

Pepe, I worked with those damned slimline maxtor drives which all had firmware issues, even if I found identical healthy drives, after hotswoping
everything is freezes. In my experience only fixing the firmware could make them work somehow.

Hi vadidaz,

Yes, I also experienced freezing in some points, but then I repeated the HS and restarted the copying from just after (or before? I don't remember) the freezing sector and it went on.
BTW I used my own cloning SW that uses PIO0 to copy, really, really slow, but worked.

pepe