Good day people!

After a power outage, the maxtor that served in a one bay NAS seems to be dead. I first tried to hook it up to my windows machine using a usb to sata cable but windows didn't detect the drive. After that I tried booting using the UltimateBootCD with the drive attached to the mobo. The drives detection was sketchy and most tools weren't able to perform their tests (most errored out saying they couldn't mount the drive because it was already mounted, or something similar). After this I used HDDScan 3.1 but all tests seem to hang.
I've been reading up on these forums but I'm getting more confused the more I read (I have a low on space brain ) so I thought I'd ask for a bit of help diagnosing the problem.

Here's the disks data and the SMART info is attached to the post.

Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0
Firmware: YAR51BW0
Serial: Y3JT8C7E
LBA: 240121728

All and any help is greatly appreciated!

Your NAS system definitely used a different operating system than Windows (with its Fat32 or NTFS).
Avoid to connect the drive again with USB to Windows - it could cause problems.

If you are lucky, the drive is still ok, but wont be recognised in Windows because of
the different file system.

To proove that, you could connect the hdd internally onto the PC (on one available SATA port)
and stop the start process (usually with the <Del> key or the <F2> key while starting - to
enter the CMOS. But dont continue to start Windows with this drive connected !

If the drive is recognised in BIOS - you should see one more drive than before in the list
- then the drive itself is most probably ok - and you could do the following:

1. Aks for assistance of a pro in Belgium here in the forum - if you are scared about your
data. This is also the sole option when the drive is defect - i.e. not recognised in BIOS:

or if you dont want to do that
2. you could try to get a similar NAS case without drive to get your hdd working again
(but create a 1:1 clone for that try !)

or
3. you should create a 1:1 clone of your drive - and then try to get your data out (of the
clone) with special software - i.e. R-Studio or similar. But keep the original hdd safe
and untouched.

+++

Thanks for your reply!

The NAS uses an embedded linux: the drive is formatted in ext3. The reason I connected it to the windows machine is because I recovered data from it once before (after partitions got erased by user error) and that worked fine.
The drive is detected normally in the bios when directly connected to the mobo sata.

For some reason it's only acting up when trying to access data on it. For example: when I connected it as only drive in my pc, it took about 30 seconds to state the well known "operating system not found" message (which is normal) after all bios related stuff was done where that message would pop up instantly on a well functioning hdd.

If drive is detected as "Maxtor 6Y120M0" and not "Maxtor CALYPSO" it's good.

The problem is that the drive CAN be degraded, CAN have developed bads or during power outage CAN have suffered from zapped servo.
Moreover , I don't like very much the attached SMART report - even if it is not absolutely indicative of drive condition.

Anyway with the proper tools / knowhow it is possible to get the majority if not all of data from it, maybe in case of zapped servo it needs extra skill and K-H but this is an event that we don't know if it happened.
If you really want to do it yourself, there are plenty of ideas, but if data is of any value greater than zero, I suggest to be extremely careful.

Unless there are some harmless software tools or procedures to try and recover the data, I'm not thinking about doing it myself. I do value the data that's on there though, so I was thinking to try and diagnose the problem and then take it to a pro to have it fixed.

So if anyone knows someone in Belgium, do let me know, thanks!

In Belgium, try to contact with this guy :
dobrevjetser
http://forum.hddguru.com/member5963.html

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Agree, Dobre comes highly recommended.

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I've missed these last few posts for some reason, thought I had new reply notifications on... oh well... In any case, thanks for the info and referral to dobrevjetser!

Meanwhile a QNAP NAS engineer has tried some things remotely. He was able to connect to the NAS using Telnet and from what I could tell he did see the data (I saw a directory listing with all my created dirs) but the he couldn't recover anything since the "system partition is corrupt". He claimed there was a chance I could get the data off by mounting it into a USB case, but I tried and that didn't work.

Hm. You might be able to get at it through UFS Explorer, but if it you're getting hanging tests and sketchy recognition - you'll have to image it and repair the EXT3.

Also, some of those NAS fs are double-layer, well, it looks like you've got it on its way anyhow. That fellow Dobrevjetser helped me out with some info.

Dobre is a good resource. Highly recommended here, too.

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