Raithe Posted August 20, 2012 Share Posted August 20, 2012 Okay, so I've got a maxtor 750 gig harddrive that's suddenly started to act up. As in, it's not always showing up in Bios or Windows, then it will show up, but when you go to click properties it might hang. Or it might actually let you explore it, but then decides to crash out explorer. Then it'll let you schedule a disc check, but the moment you restart the machine it disapears from bios again... I'm guessing it's pretty much toast, but does anyone have any suggestions for how possible it is to access and get things off it? "Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Humanoid Posted August 20, 2012 Share Posted August 20, 2012 Doesn't sound good. Can you still hear it spin up normally and such? It *probably* isn't a head crash which means the data is technically still 100% recoverable if it's critical stuff - my guess is that the electronics failed - but will likely cost you hundreds of pounds to pay a data recovery specialist to get it out. In the past it was (relatively) easier to swap out the PCB in the event of a failure like this, but I don't believe this is a practical end-user solution with more recent drives - no personal experience with it though. Not saying that you can't buy a replacement PCB for your specific drive, but it'd be a lot more complicated than just ordering it in and plugging it in. Do physically inspect it though, often you can see when one of the chips or whatever has blown. In terms of things you can try, there aren't many: you could try swapping the cables/ports that it connects to in case it's a problem with either of those, or try it in another PC, but I'd not be terribly optimistic. P.S. Looking for replacement PCBs on Google brings up stuff like this - http://www.onepcbsolution.com/index.html L I E S T R O N GL I V E W R O N G Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gorgon Posted August 23, 2012 Share Posted August 23, 2012 (edited) Yeah, death throes. I had one come back to life recently though. It had been taking very long to spin up and one day it just gave up the ghost. Then a week later it returned, I had more or less forgotten it was there, still churning along slow as ever, but allowing me to salvage what I wanted from it. Some temp files/ program casche created by photoshop and something else probably hastended its demise. Don't bother with a disk check, before you have recovered what you want. There are only so many reads left, it might not make it. Edited August 23, 2012 by Gorgon Na na na na na na ... greg358 from Darksouls 3 PVP is a CHEATER. That is all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raithe Posted September 6, 2012 Author Share Posted September 6, 2012 (edited) So yes, as a follow on from that.. I picked up a rather nice Western Digital 3TB drive.. but now Windows refuses to recognise it properly. My bios recognises it as 3TB, but windows insists on saying it is simply 750 Gb.. I've initialised it with GUID partition tables instead of MBR due to it being over 2.2TB in size, but natch, that does bugger all to do. It only lets me format it as a 750Gb drive. I've spent a bit of time poking around on forums and they pretty much do the "yes its an issue with drives over x size, that's why you have to use GUID not MBR..".. It's a wee bit annoying. Any suggestions as to what blindingly obviously approach I must be missing? Oh yes, and to confirm, I'm not using it as a boot disk, just a nice spare hard drive to throw things on... Edited September 6, 2012 by Raithe "Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted September 6, 2012 Share Posted September 6, 2012 What windows version do you have? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raithe Posted September 6, 2012 Author Share Posted September 6, 2012 Windows Vista Ultimate... 32 bit "Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted September 6, 2012 Share Posted September 6, 2012 I have read that 32-bit operative systems can have problems with anything over 2.2 TB. But I found this thread with people having the exact same problem, and they managed to solve it. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/269483-14-seagate-barracuda For most people it appears to have been an issue with nForce SATA drivers, so if you have a nvidia motehrboard, updating those is probably a good place to start. The last 5-10 posts were the most informative I think. (it's about a seage disk, but I'd guess manufacturer doesn't matter in this case) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raithe Posted September 7, 2012 Author Share Posted September 7, 2012 Thanks for the idea. Pretty much everything I've seen suggests chipset updates.. But the damn things insist they're the latest updates as it is. Guess I'll keep poking at it.. "Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raithe Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 Okay, well I managed to resolve the issue. Even though every checkup I was having it run kept telling me the nforce chipset was up-to-date.. When I manually double-checked it.. it wasn't. One update later, and everythings recognised hunky-dory. Anyhow, thanks for the suggestions. "Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Glad you got it working Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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