Raleighbum

Does anyone know what could be the reasons of getting thfollowing kind of info about a 2 months old 160GB Matrox HD installed, formatted with a XP Pro, and now a new XP Pro won't recognize the drive?

- Bios shows that it's there
- Device manager sees it
- Disk management doesn't show it on the upper list of drives, but lower has this info about it:

"Disk 1 (red cross over)
Dynamic
Unreadable"

Can't boot another windows startup to THAT HD, it says it's unreadable or damaged somehow?!?! But it's brand new!

And it worked just fine with my old XP Pro I had on my computer before this new XP.
(I stored all my important stuff to this Matrox before I formatted the C: which makes the problem so nice.. lol)

Thanks Gurus!

steveincolumbus

From my history with Maxtor HDD's thats about the lifespan of one. I have had a few DOA's and several die before the 30 day mark. There is a reason they are the cheapest brand at the store.

I would always go for Seagate or Western Digital.....
Most Seagate drives have 5 year warranties but so far never had to use one on an IDE drive.

muckluck

Maxtor Hard Drives are awesome. I use a six year old Maxtor 20 GB as a backup drive. No problems with it what so ever. I say you contact Maxtor on the issue (not sure how their customer support is, because I've never had to use it )

cyrnel

Do you see an "Import Foreign Disks" option? If so, try it.

If not...
Did you use any partitioning tools other than Disk Management?
Did the disk boot on a box with an older version of windows?
Either of those could have damaged the volume(s) which would mean some reconstruction or recovery is required.

Disks set up as "Dynamic" require more effort to move between systems. They use a database stored with the system to map what should be to what's on the disks. While this is helpful for multi-disk filesystems it can cause issues when moving between boxes. Avoid dynamic unless you know specific reasons why you need it. Never use it for a disk that might touch WinXP Home or earlier win versions.

Edit: I wouldn't worry about a hardware failure at this point. XP obviously recognizes the disk is present, it's dynamic, but it doesn't know how to interpret the contents. Now it's time to import if possible or learn more and repair if possible. If we can't get it to behave then it's time to attempt file recovery.

RAGEAngel9

Ok I had this problem a few months ago.
What I learned is NEVER EVER FUCKING USE WINDOWS DYNAMIC DISKS!
It just causes problems.
I never figured out how to fix it through Windows.
My advice, get a copy of Knoppix and copy the files else where to backup and then format the drive.

Dilbert1234567

for clarification, RAGEAngel9 is not emphasizing this enough, DYNAMIC DISK ARE FUCKING HORRIBLE!

__________________
Donate Blood!

"Love is not finding the perfect person, but learning to see an imperfect person perfectly." -Sam Keen

cyrnel

Dynamic is useful, assuming there's a need. I'll agree however that Disk Management is far too relaxed about foisting the option upon the unwary. For some reason MS decided anyone who bought XP Pro would be attending roadmap & filesystem tech seminars and automatically know when to use what. The fact they have warnings throughout their knowledgebase but squat in their help sysem tells me the right people didn't think this stuff through.

Filesystems are always neglected topics. /whine

liquidlight

And just a clarification that I didn't see here:

The Windows designation "Unreadable" does not mean that the drive is damaged, just that the data format on the drive is not recognized by the operating system. Unless there is data on the drive that you need back the quickest solution is just a format and rebuild the Volume. If you need the data back. . . well then my friend you have my sympathies. There are several software programs that can scan it and recover information if you can't import the drive.

Good luck!

__________________
Halfway to hell and picking up speed.

cyrnel

Except in the relatively rare case of hardware failure, recovering files from an unmountable (dynamic or other) volume isn't difficult. The difficulty comes with doing everything remotely. It's during this process users often revisit the importance of their files.

ajji

Hi,
I had an issue two days ago with 120 Go maxtor hard drive.
It was may be even worst than for you because it made all the system much slower, 15 minutes to start xp and 5 minutes of system freeze when trying to access the drive...

The drive was recognize in the bios but in windows explorer by clicking on it, there was some error messages : I/O error or disk not formated

I didn't found anyone in computer stores able to help me to get back my data.
But finaly going on maxtor website I found the solution : they offer a software that you can use to make a bootable floppy disk. This will allow you to check your maxtor hard drive and repair it if possible. For me it worked fine, the tool found some issues repaired them and everything went back to what it was before. The important point is that I didn't loose my data. You could try this it might solve your problem

The utility is called powerMax , here is the link for the download :
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

But maxtor hard drive are not always having issues I still have an old 12 Go maxtor drive and it always work perfectly

__________________
Addicted to programming... But I cure myself !!!

F-18_Driver

I only had a problem with one Maxtor. Tried to image my boot disk onto it, and the computer always locked up somwhere short of completion.

Maxtor tech support was good, and I didn't have long waits. Unfortunately, the problem didn't get solved by them.

Then, by chance, I looked in the bios and noticed that the cooling fan was turning at zero rpms, and the cpu temperature was about 200 degrees.

One $10 cooling fan later, the problem was solved.

I'm not usually that lucky.