I have a 40GB Maxtor 4D040H2 hard drive that has suddenly died on me. The PC reports a primary master hdd error. I've tried in another pc with similar results.

Drives spins up and I can hear the heads load(?) once, but that's it. No other suspicious noises The BIOS reports it as a MAXTOR ROMULUS.

Doing some searching on this suggests that the data and mechanism are probably ok, but the drive firmware has got corrupted and has put itself in safe mode.

There seem to be copies of the firmware around that I could load, but I can't find a tool to use them without spending $400 or more, which is more than the lost data is worth.

I'm not intending to reuse the drive, but would like to get the data off.

Is there any hope? Can anyone point me at a tool that can be trusted not to make the situation worse?

ian

Hi,

The only reasonable thing U can do is to find a pro who can do the recovery maybe on a price affordable, but I am not sure U can find one. It always depends on your location. U may contact me for a quotation if U want.
If U are not familiar with FW recoveries U would surely screw up things even if U could access FW...

regards,
pepe

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery