Hi guys,
I have a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 200GB ATA/133 HDD which I use as a external HDD through Firewire. I use it to store all my digital photos on. Last night I noticed I was unable to access the disk, and on investigation through My Computer (I run Win XP Home) I noticed that the disk had been renamed to "Local Disk" instead of its previous name and when I tried to select it, I got the message that the disk is either corrupt or unreadable. The disk is about 15mths old, so still in warranty, and has had no previous problems (hasn't missed a beat). I've noticed since, that when I switch it on, it appears to not be spinning. XP "sees" it, but I am unable to interrogate it. I have tried plugging it into a different PC and the result is the same.

The data on it is very important to me. Ironically enough I have just purchased a new PC and was starting the backup process on this disk when I was unable to access it. Talk about timing!

Anyway, I am desperate to either fix the disk, or at least save the data on it, so if anyone has any experience, suggestions or thoughts I would certainly welcome them.

Thanks, as always,
Aquaboy.

Hmmm. if your HD is just corrupted, and not ''kapot'' you might still be able to recover the data.
If your HD is broken, the data is lost unless you ask the manufacture to recover the data. It would involve hanging the disk from your HD to a working one.

Note don't do anything yet until you are sure not to loose your data

Hi Aquaboy, welcome to PCHF

You might be able to try this. Take the actual drive out of the external caddy ( check that it does not invalidate the warranty first!!). Put the drive into your pc either on the secondry IDE channel or set it to being a slave on the primary channel. Check that it is being detected in the BIOS, then start your pc normally and see if you can access it from there.
All the bestO0

I ahve tried scanning the disk with "Recover My Files" and it "sees" the files, so hopefully that means they are still there right? I am certainly not going to do anything drastic without trying all avenues.

My PC is running 4 x 250GB HDDs in a RAID 0 format. Can I still do what you describe above?

Cheers.

Originally Posted by Aquaboy

I ahve tried scanning the disk with "Recover My Files" and it "sees" the files, so hopefully that means they are still there right? I am certainly not going to do anything drastic without trying all avenues.

yes, that is good news. It means that your HD is alive but needs to reformat beacuse its corrupt (NOTE: DON'T REFORMAT until you have a backup of files)

1. use the prog you have and start to make backup of the files.
2. when you got all the files reformat the HD
Note any interception during format is deadly to HD, so be careful