Hi

Hope someone may be able to help me.

Have two Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300Gb IDE ATA 133 16MB cache hard drives, XP home on Primary with a number of partitions (boot, op system and data all seperated), secondary hard drive had partitions for copy data, page file and sysimages.

Both hard drives bought at same time,installed August 2005 (purchased June 2005). Basically a hard shutdown appears to have screwed my secondary drive. Here's description of what I've done and where I am:

Also have have a second back up of data on external hard drive.

Running the virus scanner integrated with Comodo 3 for first time tonight. Came back to machine after only a few minutes to find it scanning the second partition on my secondary hard drive. Machine unresponsive, HD activity light permanently lit, machine effectivley crashed. Couldn't stop Comodo Virus scanner. Had a job shutting any apps down and eventually had to do a hard reboot.

On restarting chkdsk ran and reported 6 or so segements as unreadable on the partition of the hard drive that Comodo was scanning. chkdsk then ground to a halt with hd activity light permanently lit.

After a few restarts and trying to boot into last known good config, safe mode etc chkdisk then started to run through the same partition reporting everything as unreadable.

I stopped this by doing another hard reboot (it looked like it might take a long time!) and decided to reformat the offending partition with PM.

On restart chkdsk ran again and has stuck after completing verification of files, index and security descriptor. So effectively locked out of my machine.

Disconnected the Secondary drive and that has allowed me to boot into windows on Primary drive and everything running normally. Created pagefile back onto data partition for time being. Done a current backup of data from Primary to external HD.

Checked secondary drive again with PM8 and offending partition reported an error 1151 "Bad Shutdown Command" I think it said.

Anyways, deleting all partitions on the drive and reformatting the entire disk has eliminated the shutdown error but reconnecting the disk still giving a hang in chkdisk after completing verification of files, index and security descriptor.

Not sure where to go now. Is it worth trying writing zeros to whole disk? Do you think the drive has gone to the great scrapheap in the sky?

OK, so what are we trying to do?

If the data on the secondary drive is not important, get a new drive and replace it under warranty. Check warranty status on www.seagate.com

I was trying to work out if the HD is actually phut or if there it may still be usable. I take it from your response that it's probably gone phut.

I had all data backed up externally as well so that's why I reformatted May not have been as quick to do that otherwise!

There's a chance you might be able to get the drive usable for unimportant things. If your drive isn't OEM, you have a 5 year warranty. Why not take advantage of it?

Hold it. I'll pm you in a few hours with a possible solution.