I have a dead maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 - 6y080l0 - Calypso III (drive spins up but can't be recognized in the bios). I read all info that i could find with Google. Then I looked up someone who had the same model and i even got the same board with the same firmware, same processor, same ram and motor controller.

I switched the boards and on a IBM computer i can detect the hdd but can't see the 2 partitions (RAW file systems). I can however run a recovery program that stopped working at 65% and it's there for 2 days.

On another PC i have connected the hdd over an USB HDD adapter and it started to auto play the content of the two partitions. I can see the correct size, name, i can see the file system (NTFS) as well but i can't run any data recovery software nor copy the files over on another healthy drive.

CAN someone please advise me??? What should i do??? Is there anything else i could try??? I only want to get some pictures out of the My Documents folder. I haven't tried to switch the eeprom but I'd like to avoid this for now since i don't have the proper equipment to do that.

Thank you in advance !

PS: When connected on the pc this hdd slows down the host a lot. The pc can't be used to do anything else.

Sounds like the drive needs either the ROM swapping over (assuming it has one, not all Calypso have), or the drive has multiple bad sectors.

Easiest thing to try first is to image the drive to a good drive and run the DR software on the clone. Something like CopyR or ddrescue will image the drive and handle the bad sectors.

I moved the hdd on another pc where i'm 100% sure that everything is in order. I tried with winpe and the partitions are seen as raw file systems. So i went further and tried to clone the partitions on another healthy drive.

I receive read errors on a few sectors and the software stops with a nasty message, on ghost, acronis and the other partition clone programs from the hirens boot cd that i'm using.

I will try what pcimage suggested..

PROBLEM SOLVED!

I did copy the partitions with copyr then connected the healthy hdd to the pc that had windows xp installed. It detected the hdd, the partitions ran a scandisk and fixed the indexes and recovered all data in a lost files directory.

Afterwards.. all i had to do was to search the folders and copy those i needed onto another hdd to burn them on 2 dvd's.

Thank you for your help and good luck to all of you !