A coworker of mine wanted me to rescue some old Outlook Express emails off a 6-year-old 40GB Maxtor hard drive... upon further investigation this thing's @#$%ed six ways from Sunday. Windows, on its own, does not recognize the drive, nor does Linux. I've tried several programs with no good result so far: system rescue CD (told me it's got a few thousand bad sectors); PC Inspector ran a few days after pausing for every error- weighing down the "I" key helped that along, pretty well told me it's screwed; and Spinrite is stuck at 13% (gone from 13.13 to 13.22 after the last 24 hours).
Drive's now running thru a USB enclosure rather than on any machine's IDE channel. Can't get the drive to read anywhere to see if whatever old emails can even be salvaged yet.

Short & sour: bad sectors galore, drive won't read, is this totally helpless?

Thanks...

5/26/2009 7:15:26 PM

I've heard that sometimes the electronics on a drive fail before the hardware. If you can find an identical, working hard drive, it might be possible to use the controller board on the bottom of it to run the broken drive. paerabol had a busted drive and I suggested this to him... it worked just fine. His situation was a little different though.

5/26/2009 8:29:34 PM

freezer trick?

5/26/2009 8:50:41 PM

Freezer trick was a stretch on that bum Macbook drive but it worked, hmmm... while connected to the computer it made a lot of winding up & winding down noises, not a good look sound.

Anything's worth a shot, right? Onward to eBay to find a spare Maxtor 2F040L0 ... or its PCB which is a whopping thirty bucks!


For sh!ts n' giggles, is easyrecovery worth anything?

5/26/2009 9:20:14 PM

Craigslist might be easier/faster than eBay.

5/26/2009 11:04:12 PM

is the disk detected at all in Linux -- not the filesystem, but the raw disk? I'm not sure how it could fail to be recognized but then detected by various CDs and utilities, perhaps I'm misreading that...

but if the raw disk is at all detected, run dd_rescue on it until you get bored and then bust out some data recovery on the image if it's still not readable... combine with freezer trick or new board for extreme desperation

5/27/2009 12:11:23 AM

freezer trick is underway, will try back in the next 18 hours

5/27/2009 12:36:05 AM

Well???

5/28/2009 3:11:18 AM

i've seen the freezer trick work multiple times.

5/28/2009 10:13:23 AM