Maxtor hard drive- anybody have a spare one....

[Neilk]

Hi,

Anybody have a working Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 hard drive that they aren't using? It seems as if the BIOS on the circuit board got trashed somehow so I wanted to swap out the circuit board to see if I can retrieve the data.

Those drives ranged from 20 to 40Gb. Apparently the most important factor in swapping out the board is that the hard drive code should be NAR61590.

The data on the drive is somewhat important, just not worth spending $500+ to retrieve.

Thanks!

[bryanthompson]

I *think* matrox will replace broken harddrives, no matter their age. It could have been WD, I'll ask him. But, he was going around to the schools and collecting their busted harddrives, sending them in and getting fresh ones. He built some insane rack for them, has terrabytes of storage. It's madness.

[Neilk]

Bryan,

If your friend could score a working Maxtor that would be great.

Since this is an OEM Maxtor drive from a nearly 3 year old Dell PC, it's already out of warranty. Plus, returning the drive for a new one won't get my co-worker's data back, swapping the circuit board just might work.

Thanks!

[bryanthompson]

I'll send him an email real quick. Do you have specific model #/capacity? is "DiamondMax Plus 8" enough to identify it, or did they put that label on many models?

[Neilk]

Thanks Bryan,

You can forward the following to him.

I am looking for a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 hard drive. It can range from 20 to 40Gb. The model number is 6E030L05, where the 3 refers to the GB size. Apparently the most important factor in swapping out the board is that the hard drive code should be NAR61590.

THANKS!

[HardDrive]

I'm confused.

If you just need to get the data off, why not buy a $30 USB drive enclosure, hook it up to another system and suck the data off?

Perhaps I don't understand the problem.....

[Neilk]

HardDrive,

It seems as if the BIOS of the circuit board on the hard drive got corrupted, so placing the drive in a USB enclosure won't help. I want to replace the circuit board to see if that will fix the hard drive.

[HardDrive]

Ah! Sorry, I didn't read carefully. Strange still, as an IDE drive does not have a bios. What you are attempting should work if you can get exactly the same board. IDE drives are pretty simple devices.

[bryanthompson]

I've read about it working before. I've also heard that sticking the drive in the freezer may give it a few minutes of life, but I'm sure snopes will have proof on that one.

No word from my friend yet. He should have gotten off work around 3:30 cst.

[Neilk]

Thanks Bryan. If your friend can't find one, I'll try fleabay.

HardDrive, unfortunately it seems like it's a common problem with the Maxtor drives. Here's a link that describes the issue.

And here's a picture from my new camera-phone.

[Neilk]

Can't upload pictures from Firefox. So here it is.

[chapstic2001]

Neil,
It will be tricky to find a matching board to use, thus making sure you have the right firmware. Since it looks like you are going to be on the market for a new primary disk anyhow, I would suggest doing a clean install on a new disk, get your O/S, drivers and apps all back up to par and attached the dying drive as a spare and see if you can pull your files. I saw your comments regarding the USB alternative so you may run into the same wall.

Come to think of it. Can you hook it up as a spare run a Maxtor utlity and try to flash the bios?

I have a few dead drives at home, some of which are maxtor, I will see if they any are the one you need.

[Neilk]

Chapstic,

Thanks for checking.

I got a new 160gb drive and it installed it. I installed the old drive in serveral different computers with no luck. Hopefully a "new" circuit board will revive the drive. At least it's not making any weird noises.

[chapstic2001]

Neil.
Sorry, no go on the board you need. Have you tried looking at downloads.com or cdnet.com for applications that work similar to the Flashback application Maxtor mentions?

Good luck,
Steve