Hi
I bought a "Maxtor personal storage 3200" 18 months ago (It's a 320 GB HDD that has 2 separate cables for power & USB connection and I liked that design because I have the habit of disconnecting the power from it - after safely disconnecting it from XP of course - with an on/off switch so that it does not run uselessly and to extend its lifetime and to keep it away from any possible problems on my own machine...etc)

Last time I worked on it was just 2 days ago where I backed up my files normally and then disconnected power as normal and today when I connected power to throw some new files on it, It wasn't recognized by Windows at all. I felt so worried so I took it and tried it on my brother's Laptop which runs Vista and sill is not recognized. That made me crazy because it was working fine 2 days ago and nothing new was added to my machine (software or hardware) in that period.

After a lot of trials with some data recovery software, no single software was able to see it because it was not seen in Windows and also it was not seen at all with "Hiren's boot CD) so I listened to a friend's advice to get the HDD from inside the plastic case and connect it as a slave and now Hiren's CD can detect the drive as well as the data recovery software installed on my XP BUT NOTHING AT ALL was able to deal with it. I even couldn't format it in by anyway. This is the toughest experiment I’m getting and very sad for my lost DATA and money (it was expensive when I bought it)

I really don’t know what to tell you guys but all I understood from the software that there is a corrupted zero sector and the drive is locked!! (I don’t even know that my drive supports security features so I don’t even have the idea about how it’s locked AND/OR how the zero sector went bad. My main machine is ABSOLUTELY free of any viruses or malware)

Now, I’m totally lost so that’s why I’ll try my last hope in this forum to know from you guys if there is any chance of getting my data back and if there is no chance, How can I re-format this drive to make use of it at least. It refuses to format or anything at all!
P.S. The drive inside is a SEAGATE Barracuda 7200.10. It’s MODEL is: ST3320620A. Firmware is: 3.AAE


VERY SORRY for the long post but I wanted to provide as much information as possible in order to have possible hope from you experts.

Test the drive alone connected to pc. If works, it was the box. If not, the drive has to be serviced and no boot cd or free sw will help. P.s. If the drive spin up, it's likely NOT THE PCB (before you ask). In that case you need a pro and, of course, got to pay.

It does not work even out of the box. The drive is still spinning so as "HeadCrash" told me, it's likely a firmware issue and I feel like I tend towards this assumption but from my knowledge of firmware in general, any firmware has a hardware part and a software part. So if the defect is from the software, is it possible to rebuild a new firmware? and if it's a hardware, is it possible to replace the chip? and If i need a pro. How much - in average - this gonna cost me?
Thanks for your input guys. I'm still eager to hear your feedback

Can you help me guys download the tool by which I update the firmaware and the firmware itself (I think there is 3.AAF which is supposed to be more recent than mine). Of course my data is important but I'm not very rich to pay on this HDD again. I'll try all my best and if i failed, I'll save money for a pro treatment of it. Thanks

I am quite sure this kind of problem is in the range 300 $ - 500$ / EUR for a complete recovery.

About the firmware, please don't think it is a DVD player or a cell phone and you put something on the USB port, connect the drive and "flash" it. The firmware is recorded on the platters and need something like PC3000 UDMA (more than 10.000 $) plus the knowledge to fix it. It's not like "press ok... next... next... done" .

I ran MHDD and it reported the following:

Warning: The drive is locked by ATA Password

I'm really surprised because I DID NOT put any passwords. It's even my first time that hard disks can be locked by passwords!

How can I get rid of this problem to access my lost data which 'll take me an enormous time and effort to re-collect them from the zillions of backup CDs that I have. Even all of these CDs mostly contain outdated data and they make about 70% of what was there on my Seagate HDD

Then it's a problem in the SA. You won't be able to deal with this problem without special hardware tools. If the problem is ONLY this, a pro can do the job (assuming has the knowledge and proper gear) for a reasonable price. But if you don't want to spend, let's say, 50$, live without your data.

This "problem" could be not solved by u self, u should send to a DR company because there are not another solution the MHA system should not be answering " ABRT" to all sectors, so there are not another way

Regards

This is not DIY, send it to a pro who knows much about System Area.

Drive will set its user password automatically if there's a problem inside its firmware structure OR hardware.

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