www.deadharddrive.com

[omnipotentwalrus]

Hi guys, I got here through a google search looking up some info for this drive... my predicament is pretty unique as I understand it, and unlike anything I've run up against before. I'm fixing a compaq presario 8000 that has one of these drives (Maxtor MaxLine Plus II) that crashed and came back from the dead... I managed to get the desired data off of it already through some disk recovery software on my main desktop, and also managed afterward to do a quick NTFS format on the whole drive (wiping out original system part. as well as restore part.) and completely installed windows - everything is running fine. The thing is, sometime in the process of trying a few different data recovery softwares somehow the drive's firmware became convinced that it's bad and the SMART is going off at me from the Award BIOS every time I boot. On my desktop my BIOS lets me turn off the warning, but on the Compaq I have to hit F2 to continue every time... takes me all the way to windows, I even ran chkdsk on the drive, defragged it, ran fixboot, fixmbr and all, no errors coming up anymore. And yet, I'm hesitant to put their data back on the new partition yet over the network... Should I accept what SMART is telling me and pull the drive, replace it and reformat that one to play it safe, or am I on the right track with thinking it's something in the firmware and trying to repair it? There exists a maxtor firmware repair utility provided free from www.salvationdata.com but none of the downloads work - a thousand sites across google have the link but they all refer to the same dead file (not findable through their main page, either.). I finally tracked down one that I thought was perfect from a file mirror, but it turned out to be for another specific model! And I used my last CD to burn all 1MB of it, though of course it tells me this only after it's burned and booted. ARGH. That and maxtor (now owned by seagate I guess) doesn't supply specific drive firmware updates, and their MaxBlast software is opening and then doing nothing on both computers I try to run it on... I found what I think is the raw firmware, but without some kind of windows utility or some knowledge of how to turn it into a boot disk or what, I don't know how to use it. Is it OK to keep hitting F2 to continue, or is this drive doomed? Thanks for whatever help I can get..
_________________
I fix, therefore I am..

[harddrivespecialist]

SMART is a group of programs on a drive which monitor drive condition (health of the drive)
There is a problem with your drive, either its a number of realocated bad sectors or a read/write errors and etc.
SMART is notifying you about it.

It could be fixable, but you will need special hardware/software to do this.

I would not risk storing important data on that drive.
_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

[omnipotentwalrus]

Hey, thanks and noted. I'd already started running HDD Regenerator from Hiren's.. 1318 bad sectors found and restored so far..
_________________
I fix, therefore I am..

[Kit]