Yesterday, i switched off my desktop and restarted it and my Maxtor drive stopped responding. Before the restart I was able to access the harddrive without any problems.

The maxtor was plugged in as a slave drive. When i restarted, my bios would not detect both my harddrives which are connected by Sata, when i unplugged the maxtor; it would detect my primary hdd without any problems.
I opened up an external casing, and tried to connect the maxtor thru usb, but windows would not detect it. I can feel the harddrive is powering up, and it continues to spin without any clicking noises. (only sound i can hear is it powering up).
I'm not sure if the drive may be dead or not, but does anyone have any recommendations on how i could try and recover the data?



(Hard drive is currently with a friend who is trying to recover it as well, but I belive it was a DiamondMax, but I am not 100% sure, can confirm tomorrow).

I finally got the harddrive back from my friend.. its a DiamondMax22, it seems there is now a clicking sound as well.. anyone have any suggestions?

Hmm, could possibly have been an easily fixable fw problem while it sounded normal and before it went to your "friend".

Now he has possibly done "something" to make it start clicking, and so WAY BEYOND DIY now.

Seek pro service, or forget about it. Simples.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Has you friend changed the PCB? If so, then this would explain the clicking. You must reinstall the original PCB. It has unique drive specific information stored in a serial EEPROM. The original problem may have been the well known BSY bug, in which case Seagate offers free data recovery services.

To confirm you still have the original PCB, compare the data code on the drive's label against the date codes on the chips. The latter will have YWW (Year / Week) codes. For example, a code of 925 means that the IC was manufactured during week 25 of 2009.

Here is a Seagate date code calculator:
http://www.bugaco.com/calculators/seagate_date_code.php

See this thread for an explanation of the bug and an easy DIY fix:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... 467#M18467

no my friend hasnt actually done anything, he also tried the same thing i did, by connecting it to an external casing and trying to read it.

What is the firmware version?

Why is this one important. Do you suggest to him to flash it. Well that one is not going to help him out at all. He needs a professional tool and the correct diagnoses to fix this one. If he continues to mess with this drive he will only do more and more damage on it. Right now his hope is to seek a diagnoses from someone who has the proper tools to read this drive and see what is wrong with it.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini