Member Avatar for Danny

Hi all,

On (lucky me!) Friday the 13th, my Maxtor 250GB SATA drive failed. Its connected to a Promise SATA PCI Card, and my computer specs are as follows: 2 existing SATA drives connected to mobo, 2GB ram, 3.2Ghz P4 HT.

The error:
Windows loads very sluggishly, and when I try to access the drive in "My Computer," after about 5 minutes it gives an I/O error.

What I've Done:
I tried re-seating the SATA cables. I enabled/disabled the drive in device manager, and I also rebooted many times. The Promise card BIOS detects the drive just fine upon every bootup! I have the drive disabled right now so my computer doesn't load slowly.

Why I need help?:
I have some very important data on there, including 100GB of music (and ripped CDs). I also have some important videos and pictures. Clearly data recovery for this drive (of this size) would be *very* expensive, so unless I can do it myself, I don't know if thats an option.

Any ideas?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by cryogen
Member Avatar for Thong_Ispector

I would try two things...

Download Knoppix Live CD which is a bootable CD that will not write anything to your hard drives and see what you can save by moving data to another drive.

I would also move the 250 to one of the motherboard SATA ports to see if the problem might be in the promise controller or the drivers for it.

Member Avatar for Danny

I opted for Knoppix. Wow this is cool!

I found all my data, and I ran out and purchased a 120GB USB drive. I'm actually on Knoppix right now, and I am backing up the data. I used Konquerer and dragged everything over -- but I'm at a deadly slow transfer rate. It bounces from 1.4MB/s down to 10KB/s.

Any ideas on how to improve this? It's an SATA drive going to a USB2.0 device!

Member Avatar for DaniBoi

Hi everyone:
Just like danny i have a maxtor device but with only 120gb. I have over 20 gbs of music, very important notes, and photos that mean a lot. just last night it was working well, i was down to about 7gbs left. this morning when i tried to get access to the maxtor gb i couldnt and i was recieving I/O errors. windows would run sluggishly even freezing up on me. i dont want to lose everything is there anyway or maybe a trick to retreaving my stuff from this maxtor nightmare
Any help would be greatly apreciated

Member Avatar for goldeagle2005

Let's check if the drive itself is a goner or not. Connect the drive to a mobo with an inbuilt SATA controller. If the computer again runs sluggishly, it's a fault with the drive.

Member Avatar for DaniBoi

Goldeagle thanks! but yesterday i figured the problem,it was that i used up the whole Maxtorharddrive and that was the answer to the errors and sluggishness. but from one problem another one grew. to get my maxtor working again i used a certain software i had never used before and it removed everything in my maxtor hard drive completely. :( i lost everything... do you or anyone know of a way to retreave everything back?

Member Avatar for khansen46

This reply may be a little late for this particular thread, but I personally use R-Studio to recover data. I have managed to recover data even from a formatted drive. Generally, I go to open source software first, but this has been the best product I've used. I own a consulting business, and have tried a lot of software. For data recovery, this is my first choice.

Member Avatar for cryogen

OK, I'm having the same problem with my Maxtor, except mine is an external hard drive. When I connect via USB Windows XP recognizes the drive as G:, but when I try to view the contents I get the I/O error. This drive was VERY full. If the I/O error is because there's too much on it, how do I get enough off to read it and recover?

Goldeagle thanks! but yesterday i figured the problem,it was that i used up the whole Maxtorharddrive and that was the answer to the errors and sluggishness. but from one problem another one grew. to get my maxtor working again i used a certain software i had never used before and it removed everything in my maxtor hard drive completely. :( i lost everything... do you or anyone know of a way to retreave everything back?

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