New Hard Drive Failure Take 2

[Dave Shearer]

Hi Everyone,

Just got a quick question to see if anyone can shed some light on this problem I seem to keep having.

Recently, my Maxtor 200Gb Hard Drive decided one day to advise me that it was not formatted, despite being formatted for a year or two. I assumed that my Hard Drive had just died and I was fortunate enough to be able to claim a new Hard Drive under warranty.

I recently got my new Hard Drive (Last weekend) and installed it without a hitch. After running it for a couple of days, it appears that when turning on my computer again today it has exactly the same problem as before. When I click on the Drive it tells me that I need to format the drive??

Can anyone shed any light on what's going on? As far as I remember, this Drive is set up as a slave (the pin is still attached). The Hard Drive hasn't made any strange sounds that sound like hardware failure, so I'm a little lost as to what's going on.

Many thanks in advance for all your help. Great site you all have here.

Cheers, Dave

[Freakitchen]

Welcome to the forums, Dave.

Sounds like you're having a case of bad luck here.

You mention the drive is set up as a slave drive. I assume, therefore, that there is another drive configured to master on that cable?

At this point, I'd be running Maxtor's diagnostics on the drive. It's available on the ultimate boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com). Download the ISO, and write the image using burning software to a CD. Then boot from the CD, Maxtor's diagnostics are under "Hard Disk tools"

FK

[Dave Shearer]

Welcome to the forums, Dave.

Sounds like you're having a case of bad luck here.

You mention the drive is set up as a slave drive. I assume, therefore, that there is another drive configured to master on that cable?

At this point, I'd be running Maxtor's diagnostics on the drive. It's available on the ultimate boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com). Download the ISO, and write the image using burning software to a CD. Then boot from the CD, Maxtor's diagnostics are under "Hard Disk tools"

FK

Cheers for the quick reply Freakitchen, I forgot to mention my new HD is a Seagate. Will this program help Seagate Drives too?

Cheers, Dave

[Freakitchen]

Yes - the Ultimate boot CD has diagnostics on it for all the hard drive manufacturers.

Before running the test, make sure your drive(s) are configured properly. If your are using an 80-wire IDE cable (very fine ridges, and a coloured connector at the motherboard end), your drive(s) should be jumpered to the 'cable select' position. If using a 40-wire IDE cable (coarse ridges, usually all black connectors), your drive(s) should be jumpered to master / slave.

FK

[Dave Shearer]

Thanks again mate. I'll have a look at the cd. This HD is actually running as a SATA Drive too so no IDE cables. I also thin it could be formated as FAT32. Is there a way to salvage the data on there before I re-format as NTFS??

Cheers, Dave