My Maxtor drive recently died (BIOS only recognizes it as Romulus) and based on what I head read over the past few days, I need to repair the firmware.

I thought about sending the disk out for recovery, but I think instead I am going to purchase a PC-3000 ISA and try doing it myself - but before I buy the PC-3000, I want to make sure I can find the files needed. I know the standard answer to posts like this is "Don't do it yourself, you aren't smart enough. PM me, I am able to" but data recovery is something I've wanted to venture into for quite some time, and this is the perfect opportunity. Well, I wouldn't consider a dead hard drive with 100gb of content perfect, but I have to start somewhere

Hello,

Unfortunately, i have no loader and exactly matching fw for you, but i have one opinion, and suggestion:

If you want to start to learning to fixing the fw in this drive, you have ~80-90% chance for miss up something in SA and left the drive unrecoverable.
This is not so easy like update the firmware in cellphone or similar!
The SA have a lot of unique calibration data, and adaptive informations.
This is a difficult and sensitive system.

If you really want to do that, i suggest to firt collect up some (~8-10) similar drive (D540-D740, MX4K series) with different SA damages, and try to fix these first!

This drive is not too common, and a good challange for a perfectly skilled pros as well...

Regards,
Janos

the ISA PC3000 is much more difficult to use than the Romulus, and has many less features and support. You will have difficulty in repairing this with modern equipment, such as UDMA PC3000, which is a Windows based PC3000 with an integrated database and more features designed to make it simpler.

Also, I am guessing you are new to DR, which means you have very limited, or no knowledge of SA and how it works.

I am predicting that if you purchase ISA and attempt this yourself, you will lsoe your data.

I am sure that for the price of a ISA PC3000, and the time involved, you would be much better off sending to a profesional.