tlindstrom

I've got a portable harddrive, Maxtor, 500GB, less than a year old, which suddenly stopped working some days ago, without a lot of reason to do so. I had been been disconnecting and connecting a couple of times, back and forth between two pc's, but that couldn't ruin the whole drive, could it??

So what's happening now is, when I connect it, in My Computer, instead of seeing a drive with the Maxtor icon, with all my things on it, an unformatted drive with way too little disk space on it appears. It said it had like 200 and something GB free space, while the actual drive has got 500gb. So I tried formatting it, and checking it for errors.

After I was finished with that, it still appeared as unformatted, but now with like, 800gb free space; that's more than what the drive has got! And now it refuses to format again...

Anyone know what's going on? Anyone have had a similar problem? Any help would be much appreciated, it's not actually my drive, and I'd hate to return it broken...


EDIT: Okay, so when trying it on another PC, I was able to open the drive, and put files into it. I still didn't get an icon and the Maxtor name though,and I still couldn't access my old files, but I suspect that they're still there; like, the computers just don't understand that they are.

This other PC (which is a Vista, compared to my XP), told me that the drive had around 180 gb free space... Which could be the free space that's left on it considering all the files lying on it.

Well, when I try opening the drive again on the XP, I still can't access it, and get the same kinda error.

raptor_pa

Vista to XP while it's not supposed to cause any problems, has some annecdotal history of corrupting the boot sector. XP uses an MBR format for it's partition table, Vista introduced th new GUID partition table. While Vista is supposed to maintain MBR information when it creates it's P-Table, it seems like it may not always. There is an option to use MBR formatting for compatibility. Your files may still be n the disk, but it sounds like the disk geometry is out of whack. Two options...
1) Zero wipe the drive with killdisk or dban and start over fresh
2) Run recovery software like r-studio or getdataback and scan the drive for file signatures, recover your data to another drive, and see #1

tlindstrom

Thanks a lot! Wiping with killdisk now... it sure is taking its time...

I just started it with the basic settings, is that correct?
(Wipe out Deleted / unused data: [unused clusters; MFT/Root Area] )

And I'm supposed to do a wipe? Not a kill?

raptor_pa

You want to hit the entire disk surface, probably a kill - what you want is a disk like it was when it left the factory, no file structure and all 00 Yeah it will take a bit of time, it has to write to every sector of the disk... probably talk more than a couple of hours lol....lIKE MAYBE 6 -8

tlindstrom

Okay, so the disk is killed. Thanks a lot. :)
I don't know how to access it again though. It doesn't appear in My Computer when I connect it... What do I do?

raptor_pa

Right click my computer ->manage -> in left column disk management right click the ghrey area for your drive and slect initialize. The wizrd will walk you through creating a partition and formatting - choose NTFS for the filesystem.