please help!my maxtor died last nite!

[bob1269_dup1]

dear friends. i was working late at night as usual with my g4,protools le and my external 40 gb maxtor,when all of a sudden the computer crashed down and showed a message afterwards saying that it can't recognize the drive.after a restart and trying it out on my other computers i had no luck.Could anyone tell me what's going on and if i have a hope to recover some data? thanks,i really enjoy this forum :mad:

[Salyphus]

I haven't used it but DiskWarrior is supposed to be the preferred tool for recovering data safely from damaged disks. Apparently the other ones like Norton are just as likely to make the problem worse. I would give DiskWarrior a try: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html Good luck!

[Anderton]

There is one possible failure mode that is easy to deal with (I've had this happen to me): The board itself fails, but not the hard drive. In this case you can just buy another hard drive and use the new board with the old platter. Hopefully you back things up on a regular basis...if not, maybe others will learn from your experience! Hard drives are not flawless!!

[Curve Dominant]

If all of the above fails, try a recovery-service such as Ontrack: 612 937-1107. And switch to OWC Mercury Elite FW drives. I started using PTLE in my crib about 2 months ago. As soon as I had almost a full CD of songs recorded and mixed, I ordered a second external drive, copied all my PT files onto it, and placed it in a safe deposit box in my bank's vault. You have to REALLY back up. It could be a failed drive, or your crib getting hit by fire, a robbery, Bin Laden's guys...whatever. Back that shit up, and store it off-premise.

[WooF WooF]

nO, nOo, donT back Up - i Stealla yo StufF.

[Tedster]

You think a dose of Viagra might help revitalize your hard drive? Sorry, I couldn't help it. Just trying to toss a little humor into an obviously very frustrating situation.

[Wewus432]

I liked Maxtor a lot. Sorry to hear he died. Maxtor we hardly knew ya.

[not Cereal]

maxtor, hell i hardly newer

[Apophis]

I shy away from Maxtor and IBM drives since they are notorious for failure. I had a deskstar fail just recently. Thank god I am religious inn my back up schemes. Retrospect backup is a great transparent application. I use Seagate primarily but heard Western Digitals are good as well.

[GZsound]

I recently had the same experience and had zero luck in recovering the data. Thankfully I back up to CDR after every session. And I thought Mac's NEVER failed?

[not Cereal]

the MAC didnt fail, the computer still works fine. its the PC drive in it that went bad

[IZCool]

Just a quick note (and I second Apophe's statement). NEVER buy Maxtor drives, unless you can't help it. I once told a computer-working-on friend of mine that I was going to upgrade a hard drive in my PC. The first thing that he said was "Don't buy a Maxtor". I try to stick with Western Digital. Some other friends of mine like Seagate, and others, but again... Try not to buy a Maxtor.

[vintagevibe]

[quote]Originally posted by Apophe: [b]I shy away from Maxtor and IBM drives since they are notorious for failure. I had a deskstar fail just recently. Thank god I am religious inn my back up schemes. Retrospect backup is a great transparent application. I use Seagate primarily but heard Western Digitals are good as well.[/b][/quote]Everybody states that the drive that they have that hasn't crashed is the best drive. This is an illusion. I've never had a Maxtor drive crash in 15 years but I have had both WD and Seagate drives crash. Does that mean Maxtor is the best drive and WD and Seagate are "notorious for failure"? No. It means all drives crash and all companies have bad batches from time to time. I stick with Maxtor because for me they have been the most reliable and the people I know who build systems for a living prefer them but that doesn't mean that a blanket statement saying that they are the best is in order. That just confuses issues for people looking for real answers.

[Anderton]

I've used Maxtor and Western Digital. They both work fine. However, it's generally a good idea to be consistent -- try to avoid mixing drives. In other words, have all Maxtor or all WD (or whatever) drives on the same chain, and ALL OF THE SAME TYPE (MODEL). This is not an ironclad rule -- I mix and match with removable drive bays -- but if the drives are wildly dissimilar types, one can slow down the bus and degrade the performance of the other. All hard drives fail! BACK UP!

[Wewus432]

I've heard a lot of people recommend the Maxtor, Diamond Max series of hard drives for audio work.(Pete Leoni of Prorec.com for one) This is the first time I've heard anybody say anything bad about Maxtor drives. Maybe there's different levels of quality within that brand?

[Sylver]

I heard that Seagate just bought out Maxtor. They would mean that they are essentially the same manufacturer now. I don't have confirmation of this, but it wouldn't be a surprise. As far as reliability goes ... Is any one manufacturer better than another. Well, Connors sucked. Always had problems with them. The others, certain models have been problems for other manufacturers, but most are pretty consistant. Now, if you have a Seagate, and it fails, and your buddy has a Seagate that failed, you might be under the impression that Seagates suck. But remember, a hard drive is a mechanical device. Mechanical devices tend to break down. Things with moving parts are much more suseptable to failure, than say, a CPU or memory. That's why if you have valuable data that you don't have backed up, you are looking for trouble. YOU MUST BACK UP. Curve's suggestion about the safty deposit box is a good idea. Or maybe a firebox. Don't keep you backups of critical data in the same location as the original. If you didn't back up, Craig has the right idea that the circuit board might be the problem, and it's worth a try. Data recovery services ... Hope you got a big wallet. Data recovery, last time I looked into it for a client ran $250/hr, 2 hour minimum, and you get charged regardless of whether they can recover all, part or none of your data. That was a few years back, so competition and the fact that most companies are using better backup procedures might have reduced this. It is still a time consuming and specialized skill, so, maybe not. Good luck! Good luck.