Hello all, I'm new here and to everything that stands for HDD Repair... so excuse me if I ask stupid questions...

I have a old Maxtor (N40P) Diamond Plus 8 HDD since yesterday:

NAR61590 (NAR6159Z in SeaTools)
LBA: 80293248
6E040LO510202
K,M,B,A

When I start the PC with this drive I get: "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" and after searching the internet for some time I think my "new" hdd has a firmware problem and I want to repair it. I think this arhive from the "PC-3000 Support / Firmware / Maxtor" is my case: (but correct me if I'm wrong!)

6E040L0.zip - Maxtor DM+8 40GB N40P 6E040L0 K,M,B,A NAR61590 B4FEA Ardent

But a more important question is: do I really need that hardware/pc-3000 (pci/isa) stuff to repair my drive? If so, I can't buy it here in Romania, it would be expensive and complicated, maybe...

Anyway, is there a workaround or some software/emulation solution... I have a usb hdd rack instead, so I can see the hdd with Device Manager (using XP) as "Maxtor N40P USB Device" but that's all, I can't access it or get it repaired...

If so, how can I get PC3000? And how to make it working with my hdd in my rack?

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Well, PC3000 is very expensive. The only substitute I know of is Salvation's product, and it doesn't work terribly well, but it's much cheaper (around $500 US), although I think they stopped selling them separately, they all come in a fancy box, and probably have the price for all of them raised

If your data is important, it would likely be cheaper to take it to someone to do this for you. Even if you had a PC3000, it's not a single button labeled 'Fix Drive' that you just push.

You could try a Knoppix bootable CD. Chances aren't good, but better than zero.

If your data isn't important, the solution is easy. Toss in the trash.

Well... for the 500$ I could buy myself some 1TB drives but the person who owned this Maxtor N40P wanted to throw it away, that's why I wanted it instead, thinking that maybe I'll get myself a new hdd for free... so there isn't any important data, or maybe... but not mine...

So there's no chance for my usb rack to "emulate" the pci/isa hardware of PC3000? I thought that it's more important to get the crashed drive seen by windows and only that original hardware could do it but that's way I thought that the usb workaround could substitute it, else I can't even boot up (message in the first post)... but now windows sees it, isn't it a software todo from now on?

p.s. thanks for the response & thanks in advance to everyone.

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Recovery via USB sucks in general as it is so slow. I never see more than 8Mb/s, and with todays big disks imaging them that way is a nightmare. If you plan to do it once in a while, non-professionally it will be OK. You will find though that native IDE/Sata connections "improve" your chances of a bad disk showing in BIOS.

HotSwap is a cheap alternative, but taking into account incompatibility of adaptive data, and data shifts, might not be a realistic alternative for you.

He doesn't want the data, just a free 40Gb Drive.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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Yes!

Now I have that Maxtor N40P, my usb rack to get it seen by the os and else nothing

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Seems like a lot of time and effort for nothing.

Can it be more useless than now?

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Congratulations. You are the owner of a broken 40GB drive. There's no free, or even cheap solution to repair. Even if you had access to one, there's no guarantee the drive can be fixed reliably. Also, after all this mess, it's only a 40GB DRIVE! Best solution is a toss in the garbage.

Yep But it looks just to similar to this stuff: http://acelaboratory.com/pc3000portable.php... over usb and all that... anyway, like I said, I'm no expert when it comes to hdd repair/recover hardware... I'm sure that portable "gadget" has more and complicated hardware stuff inside than my usb rack but hey ?!..."I'm a dreamer baby, why don't you kill me"


Oldschool is the right word here ... yesterday I've also became the owner of a 10GB Fujitsu hdd that had many problems but nothing that some good soft can repair,most partition managers showed only a error and stoped there... but now it's like new and works perfectly, labeled with 1999


NO NO NO... now it's decoration

@all
thanks for the responses, I hoppe you had some fun ... mission completed, decoration detected!

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