Hey, guys! I'm high as a kite right now, and it's not from the ingestion of any kind of controlled substance!

I got my "Maxtor ROMULUS" drive working, again! It's identifying itself properly as "Maxtor 4G120J6" now, and I'm really ecstatic about my accomplishment!

I'll just say it took a near-identical donor drive from a computer hardware recycler on eBay, HDD repair 2.0, and a lot of paranoid tinkering. It turned out to be a corrupt G-List or P-List or whatever. I put off using HDDr2's "Fast Repair" feature until the near-end since it sounded like "Quick Fix" and too-good-to-be-true. But it wasn't until I went step-by-step with that feature that the drive roared back to life as if nothing happened. Now I can goof around with this drive and see if there was anything I missed in my last backup!

I'd like to thank Zero Alpha and BlackST who responded to my initial queries for assistance on this forum, but I want to thank much more the existence of the forum itself for providing the cash-saving resources that I was able to download and use in my efforts. I must also thank SalvationDATA which provided a rich resource of frequently-asked questions on their web site and gave a reasonable attempt at answering a question I submitted to them myself rather than just saying "pay up or bin the drive". Thanks to them, I learned exactly what I needed to look for in a donor drive so I could broaden my search and not have to find as super-exact a match as I first thought I would need among other helpful tidbits of information.

Of course, I realize that my success was pretty much by chance. It might not have been as simple as the "Quick Fix". That donor drive could have been as useful as an antique eBay fly swatter for my purposes. But then again, who knows? You all may have new competition for your services in the next few months!

...Just kidding!