I did something a little more than stupid about two plus years ago that jumped up and bit me.

I set up system based on an Asus P4PE MB that was loaded with the features for that date. It included a built in Promise Raid Controller allowing Raid0 &1. So, I set it up using SATA to two drives using Raid0 for performance. Took the cheap way out and used adapters to hook up parallel ATA drives on the SATA controller. Dumb. Never really worked all that fast and then-----

One day the thing refuses to complete the boot process reporting a missing critical NT file (XPHome). Then the drives go off line. Running Maxtor's diagnostics the software reported that one drive was nearing failure and the other was ok. After that I tried nearly every trial version of every piece of software made to try to bring the drive to life . So far, ng.

The Maxtor install program, Max Blast, detects the drive but fails to work with it to copy anything to a new drive.

This all happened over several months time. I installed new drives on the IDE controllers in the meantime and now that the horse got out of the barn I am using Ghost regularly.

The most recent effort was another try at MHDD. Through the Raid controller not much action. It sees the drive but can't really do anything.
I took the drive and put it on an ide controller and ran MHDD. I thought I solved the problem initially. It sees the drive. Read, Write testing indicates it is working. It is unable to do anything with SMART, Config and any other command that would really do anything. It refuses the commands reporting command aborted or another error indicating no access. My weak understanding of all this seems to point at the PC board.

My only other hunch I have left on this thing would be firmware but I have not clue one on that subject.

The question is whether I reached the end of the line re. doing anything at home with this drive. The data on this array would be nice to have but I can't really spend the dollars it would take to have it professionally done.

Suggestions welcome. Thanks.

If MHDD immediately displays "abort" or similar when requesting it's SMART values, right when you press "Y", you must type the following command:



Only if it keeps aborting afterwards shall you worry.

Thanks much.

I think, notice the I think , I tried that. The drive just wouldn't come to life. I couldn't get smart to react to any of the commands.

In any case, I downloaded something called Copyr. It did a bit by bit copy onto another drive using my ide controllers. Then I took the copy I made, plugged it into the RAID controller and all kinds of magic started happening. I lost a little data by stupidly allowing scandisk, or was it chkdsk, to fix some errors. It nearly blew away all my progress. I used some data recovery software after that to recover the deleted stuff.

Then, voila, I recovered nearly everything I wanted off the broken array. This included a bunch of pictures that my wife was complaining about losing.

The bottom line was COPYR did the trick. The price was right, free.

Again, thanks for the help.

Ted