A question...

[saxmusickman]

Alright, I tried this on the Maxtor website, and none of those slobs have come back with an answer for me. Being that us ferroequinologist are usually a brighter than average bunch, ill give it a try here.

I've got a 500GB Maxtor SM3500 hard drive that inconveniently decided to switch itself from NTFS to RAW filesyetem a couple of days ago. Data recovery is not an issue, as this was a backup drive. However, any and every attempt to reformat this drive back into NTFS has failed. I've used about ten different programs, including Partition Magic 10 and Windows Recovery Console. After each two-hour format, the drive is still RAW.

Any suggestions?

BTW, this is my first, and LAST Maxtor drive. I've never had a hard drive failure before now; the only drives i've used before this were Western Digital (well, there was the IBM 75GB "Deathstar" drive, but hey, the whole lot of em' was rotten).

BTW, Part 2, CHKDSK don't work on a RAW partition, so don't suggest it!

[pstraten]

Dunno exactly. I just had to reformat a drive myself and reinstall Windows, so your question brought itself to my attention.

If you think the drive hasn't been physically fried somehow, the problem would seem to start with the conversion from NTSF.

All I know or remember from another life long ago building Novell networks, is that I used to have (relatively expensive) software tools that would make a hard drive sit up, beg, and do anything I wanted.

I expect you can still find companies that make/supply these tools, if you search around for them--but don't expect "freeware."

P.S. I wish I hadn't put this out of mind so long ago. Although I didn't use it "SpinRite" rings a bell, and I believe I used some tools from "On-Start." If you want to do an internet search I'd suggest something like looking up < low-level formatting >. Hope that's a start.

P.P.S. Just looked into it, and LLF might be risky at best with modern hard disks, especially Scuzzi drives.. Well as usual, I probably shouldn't bother anymore with advice. Still, it doesn't sound like the drive isn't worth some sort of try...

O.K. Try , < reinitializing disk > and then I go bow out and die a deserved death like any old fossil.

[saxmusickman]

... i'm dealing with a dead drive here. I've used a lot of no-name brand and two very well known disk partitioning and correction software, and i've got nada. I have even removed the drive from the computer, installed it into spare computer, and tried to fix the mbr, partitioning, and format there. It's beginning to look more and more like i'm going to be RMAing Maxtor (the drive is less than a year old). Needless to say again, this will be my last foray into Maxtorworld.

Long live Western Digital!

[Conrail Tweety]

I assume you've given up on the data since you are discussing RMA.

Download HDDerase.exe at
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
Use this to wipe the drive. It will destroy all data on the drive by an overwrite method.

It's an open source program written by a college professor who used to work for Seagate. This program will boot to floppy and display a list of all drives.

To be safe, unplug all other harddrives in your computer. Select your problem Maxtor and do a simple wipe. This program does a direct hardware access to the Secure Erase feature that is built into your drive. If the drive is good, then this program will work.

Give it time. There is no progress display to let you know when it will be done.

The higher the level of secure wipe you select, the longer it will take to complete. In your case, the simple wipe is enough to knock out anything in the way of formatting that could be causing your problem.

You will have to do a low-level format following this procedure, followed by a regular format.

After the wipe, re-connect your system drive.

Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management

If the Maxtor drive is properly connected and functional, it will appear in the list of drives as an unpartitioned drive.

[Conrail Tweety]

A prettier alternative to HDDerase.exe is Active@KillDisk found at
http://www.killdisk.com/

It shows a progress report as it runs. KillDisk will overwrite all areas currently available for writing. It will miss all areas that have been written to, but later flagged as bad by the drive. HDDerase will erase the entire drive without missing anything.

[saxmusickman]

The drive data was never an issue, as it was merely an internal back-up drive. I've still got the originals of all the data.

Using the programs you suggested should be pretty straight-forward. To be sure I would not damage any other drives or data during major hard-drive surgery, I moved the drive from my main computer to a backup that did not already have a drive. That way, I could slash and burn at my leisure without having to worry about fragging some really important data!

BTW, since yesterday, i've still been unsuccesful at recovering the drive. I loaded the Windows XP recovery console, fixed the mbr, and partitioned the drive. I tried to run chkdsk, but it reported that "the volume has unrecoverable errors". I tried to format the drive, and even though yesterday the drive said it had succesfully formated to NTSF, this morning when I turned the computer on again, it said the filesystem was unknown.

[pstraten]

"I loaded the Windows XP recovery console, fixed the mbr, and partitioned the drive."

Sorry, I still have the idea this drive may be salvageable, but I don't think "Windows-level" error correction tools will do the job.

Keep trying though--we're pulling for you. :)

P.S. Don't be real discouraged about that XP console "unrecoverable errors" message. I've recovered from them in the past (recent past, too) just fine. It will take perseverance and a never-say-die attitude, perhaps, though...

[saxmusickman]

"Sorry, I still have the idea this drive may be salvageable"

Oh yeah, i'll get this drive going, or it will die trying! I've been doing this kind of stuff for about ten years, and when something goes umph like this, it gets my blood pumping to get into the machine and find out what's going on.

You are correct; windows tools are crap. The worst MS could possibly do was take the really useful tools like FDISK and SCANDISK out of the NTFS systems when they built XP. You can't do anything with that stuff. I've always been a big fan of Partition Magic (until it converted one of my photo drives to PQP partition), and then Partition Commander. Hey, if nothing else works, i'll pull out the Linux Mandriva CD and use that to fix it!

[Conrail Tweety]

If you don't need the data, just wipe the drive. That will get you back to the point of having a completely fresh drive to partion, and Windows will be totally out of the diagnostic loop. Windows won't be able to leave anything at all on there, since the utility will boot to Linux from the floppy or CD.

If the drive fails the wipe process, then you will know the drive (or controller, or cable) is bad. If the wipe is successful, then use a S.M.A.R.T. utility to check the drive for hard errors.

If the drive passes the S.M.A.R.T. test, then the drive is likely to be good, and something within Windows is hosing up your format. You shouldn't go the RMA route until you are sure it's not a Windows problem.

Don't trust anything that's built into Windows in determining the hardware functionality of the drive.

[saxmusickman]

Ok, i've downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and used every filesystem and disk utility on it.
I'm not getting much love from the drive right now. I've got two more tricks to try. One, the hard-drive total wipe and reformatting. If my main system STILL shows that the disk is in RAW format, i'm going to switch the drive to another computer, as a secondary drive, and see what happens there. If the drive is still in RAW, after all this time, all this work to convert it, then it's going back to Maxtor.

After working with this thing for a little over a week, you can't say im giving up with lack of trying!

BTW, the Ultimate Boot CD is awesome - it's got more utilities than you can shake a stick at, including the Hard Drive wipe program that was recommended above. No one who works on PC's, either occasionally or as a pro, should be without that disk.

[pstraten]

Hey Sax, here's an idea borrowed from Conrail Tweety.

Desperation is as desperation does. He's right about wiping the drive and getting rid of all traces of your Windows installation.

I'll carry it further. After that, install Linux on it! I'd suggest something smooth and easy, like the latest "Hardy Heron" from Ubuntu. After that responds for you (and I'd bet it would--I tried it in the same fix!) it should be a snap to reformat and reinstall Windows.

If you didn't want to play MSTS, you might not even want to reinstall it...

P.S. Yeah, I'm serious. Doing that made my day on a drive I thought was dead. That's why I'm running it, and loving it on an older computer, too. Maybe only MSTS keeps me chained for now to Windows.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

[saxmusickman]

"The Drive is dead, Jim"

Things started to deteriorate yesterday, and the thing finally gave up the ghost about five this morning. Started getting I/O errors, a few telling me the partition table was bad. For the most part, all of the programs I was trying were telling me they could not access the disk. I did try installing Linux and using their partitioning software, but when Linux can't even see the drive, you know something is really fracked up!

I ran one last diagnostic on it this morning, and it came back that there is a drive-level password on the disk. A few of the people over at Maxtor seem to think this is a good indicator that something has gone wrong with the read/write heads, since I had no idea you could even put a bios-level password on a drive.

[pstraten]

"Started getting I/O errors, a few telling me the partition table was bad. For the most part, all of the programs I was trying were telling me they could not access the disk."

It must be true, because it was in all the newspapers!

Yeah, maybe it is a physical problem. But Sax, before you throw the drive in the dumpster, try what I said above.

Well, I guess that would only satisfy my own curiosity...

O.K. I am getting strange. What version of Linux did you try to install. And did you try to wipe the drive first with a real honest-to-god program that writes zeroes everywhere?

Ah, well, yes, Virginia, I do believe in Hardware Failures (but not Santa Claus). Still, I hate to admit that some manufacturer's idiot surrogate in New Delhi could tell me for sure...


P.S. So the partition table is bad...So what? You have to get beyond that, it's just a formatting matter. What the hell is a "drive-level password" anyone? Sounds like geek gibberish to be translated as "I ain't got no idea pal, so take a hike." Did you ever use any heavy-duty password encryption software to impose itself on your system?

[saxmusickman]

The drive-level password thing is apparently a new and improved security protocol that has come out in the past few years on drives. I noticed on a few diagnostic programs that is was showing MAX SECURITY, ON. You can lock it down at the drive level, keeping anyone from reading or writing to the drive. Problem is, something strange going on with your system, such as a power surge or failure at the right time, can also enable the password protection. I didn't even know about this until I tried to zero-write the drive with MHDD and it flashed up in big red letters "DRIVE IS PASSWORD PROTECTED AT THE ATA LEVEL".

Yes, I did try several programs to zero the drive; HDWipe, Drive Kill, and finally, the latest version of SeaTools. None of the programs could write to the drive. Sea-Tools went nuts tryin!

The version of Linux I was using was Mandriva.

[pstraten]

"new and improved security protocol"

Uh huh. Sound like Famous Last Words for the rest of us, and you're saying the Big Corporation in the Sky is protecting us all from ourselves. Gee, how very comforting. I'll retreat back into the womb as soon as possible and let Daddy Warbucks take care of the world.

Oh well, I couldn't blame you, faced with this. "O what a brave new world, that has such people in it!"

If you had to have the drive back, no doubt you could hire someone to recover, even fix it for you, to the the tune of $600-$1,200 dollars. Sweet. Naturally Megacorp International, LLC, PLC and Inc. has that angle covered. Much easier for you to buy a new drive for $200 or even much less.

[saxmusickman]

"and you're saying the Big Corporation in the Sky is protecting us all from ourselves"

Who the $%&@ said that? In my description of the problem, did I mention that I think having bios-level passwords on an ATA drive is one of the worst ideas since the Digital Millenium Copyright act? I was just describing the problem, certainly not going along with the cause of it! The fact that this thing just locks itself down everytime the power company decides to fart is pretty scary!

"Naturally Megacorp International, LLC, PLC and Inc. has that angle covered"

As far as who gets who in this, that's pretty much a moot point. The fact that I build a new one of these silicon-desk-idols every couple of years means that i'm payin' some fat cat in a corporate office to go to the Bahamas quite often.

I'm going to RMA this drive to Maxtor, even though I really don't want to. I won't get a new drive, and I damn sure don't want another of their drives, used or new. This drive was a P.O.S. from the get-go, and i'll be dipped in crap and rolled in bread crumbs if i'll ever buy another Maxtor! I've alreay got my eye on a nice little 750GB Western Digital over at Tiger Direct...

Wait, I digress. I'm not sure if i'm going to RMA this now useless door stop or not. I've had dreams of taking it out back, shooting it with my .45 in front of a video camera, and sending it to Maxtor to show them what I think of their products. That may very well give me infinitely more satisfaction that paying a few more bucks to send the turd back their way!

[pstraten]

Heh heh,

One thing about crap hardware--we can always vent. By the way, I don't think you need to worry (yet) about shooting that drive.

I doubt if it is even more than justifiable homicide. Just be careful of the wife and kids--there might be a ricochet...

[Conrail Tweety]

I've had dreams of taking it out back, shooting it with my .45 in front of a video camera, and sending it to Maxtor to show them what I think of their products. That may very well give me infinitely more satisfaction that paying a few more bucks to send the turd back their way!

It would be more spectacular if you had it powered up and spinning 10,000 RPM as the lead passes through it.

Please run HDDerase followed by a S.M.A.R.T. utility before pulling the trigger.

[saxmusickman]

"Please run HDDerase followed by a S.M.A.R.T. utility before pulling the trigger."

Already ran that. I've been through the entire list of programs that come with the Ultimate Boot CD, and Hirem's Boot Disk. The problems is, if the drive is locked by an ATA Drive Level password, NO PROGRAM can access the disk. You cannot format it, you cannot zero it, you cannot partition it. Sometimes, you can't even read it! This was supported by various program errors: Active Kill Disk and HDDerase simply froze, MDHH gave a password lock errror, Partition Commander would give an I/O error, Disk Management showed an uninitialized disk, SeaTools zero command gave an LBA error IN EVERY SECTOR, ATAPWD could not find the drive, and another DOS level program gave a BSOD. From what i've read (and then what the Seagate Rep told me) the drive is dead for all intents and purposes.

The major question here is how did it happen? My bet would be that the drive got screwed somehow during a power outage last week. Also from what i've read, that's not an unlikely scenario, along with power surge, or onboard chip malfunction. One last cause could be that something internal has come "unglued", as that would also cause the "ATA Password Lock" error. Regardless, i've said it in the Maxtor forum, and i'll say it here; whatever the reason the drive died, this is the FIRST drive i've has failed in all my years computing, and it failed after only six months of light use. This is the last time i'll be using Maxtor.

A last word here about ATA Level Passwords - this is the first time i've encountered or even heard of this, and it was not a pleasant experience. Apparently, a lot of other people have run into this problem too. The scary thing is that it happened without warning and without any input from me. The scarier thing though, is that if it happened once, it can happen again, with any drive, as this crap is written into the ATA spec. So much for "Trustworthy Computing" - you plunk down your $200 for the drive that is supposed to be yours, only to be locked out of it by the big companies in the name of "security"!

If there is an upside to losing a $150 drive and about a week of computing time playing with this thing, I learned a lot about drives and their workings, got a lot of knowledgable help, and came away with a couple Cd's worth of great troubleshooting tools.