Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
October 24th, 2008, 0:24
Hi all you HDDgurus.
I got some problem with a 2004 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 80GB ATA133.
Used it in a 3,5'' USB case until BIOS wouldn't recognize it anymore, all of a sudden, some days ago.
So I burned an MHDD image on a CD and booted from that. I plugged it as primary master and MHDD could see and access the drive alright.
The surface scan ran to 100% and reported no errors.
Any idea how I could make BIOS see it again?
If that won't be possible I presume that MHDD can save raw sectors to a file when I run two IDE HDDs as Master.
How can I read that file or more generally what do I do with that raw dump afterwards?
I'll try some of the Seagate tools and report if that solves my problem.
Thanks for any advice.
October 24th, 2008, 4:44
maybe the drive has some problems with its SA and it cannot reach ready state within the time frame that the POST looks for IDE drives...
try pressing pause button for some 10 secs at the POST screen, then space to continue after 10 or 20 seconds to see if it can be picked up by the BIOS.
If successful, don't trust the drive anymore, cloning it is a good idea, but MHDD cannot do cloning, only saving sectors to a file. Slow and U may run into the 4 GB file size limitation of FAT32.
use some other imaging software (copyr could be just fine and free I think, though not that fast)
pepe
October 24th, 2008, 5:25
Hello,
Agree, pepe have right.
You can stop the BIOS by pressing the PAUSE key, and wait until the drive gets ready state.
Boot up to windows, don't care about MHDD, your surface is readable.
Don't run not needed programs, try to avoid the writin to the drive, and
save your data immediately, and drop the drive away....

It have SA problems, i am sure too.
Regards,
Janos
October 25th, 2008, 9:30
Thanks, so far.
I knew that you can <pause> BIOS while booting up.
When I tried it to give my HDD more time the LED lit up for about 14 sec. Yet BIOS didn't see my drive after that, regardless wether I plugged it as primary slave or secondary master.
When I booted Seagate's '
SeaTools' it saw two drives but only offered up one for detailed working.
MHDD (from DOS shell) saw
something on my secondary IDE but couldn't do anything with it. (pic)

Windows Device Manager sees
something strange where my drive should be. (pic)

Please help me out here.
I'd like to retrieve at least some of the data before I toss it in the trash.
idea: Is there a tool with low-level access (like MHDD) that can copy the files to another disk?
I think they are undamaged, as the drive passed MHDD's surface scan.
October 25th, 2008, 12:32
This drive have big SA problem, and no way to access any data before repairing the SA!
(or controller failure can be too)
The MHDD shows only the corrupt status register, not else.
Your drive is dead.
If the data is important, seek for professional help.
Where are you based?
Regards,
Janos
October 27th, 2008, 16:49
Excuse me for my lack of knowledge, but is MHDD supposed to be run from within XP?
pepe
October 27th, 2008, 18:18
pepe wrote:Excuse me for my lack of knowledge, but is MHDD supposed to be run from within XP?
pepe
Oops, you have right!
Anyway, asking a pro never bad suggestion.
Janos
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