Best Drives & Storage Devices

17 Comments

1. PP
   Posted February 27, 2010 at 11:49 am | Permalink

   I think i had the same problem as you. Maxtor is not a good company to buy HD’s from that is what i learned from my experience there HD’s usually fail quickly they either start making noises or just die. I don’t think you can fix it your best bet is to buy a new harddrive.

2. mittalman53
   Posted February 27, 2010 at 11:23 pm | Permalink

   On the rear of the hard drive(s), the is a small piece of plastic in a recessed slot, this is a jumper. Etched in the metal above the slot are letters; MS,SL, and CS. MS=master jumper setting, move the piece of plastic to this position for the “master” setting. SL=slave jumper setting, move the piece of plastic to this position for the “slave” setting. CS=cable select jumper setting. Turn the power off, unplug it and remove the cover. Examine the first drive , insure that the jumper is set to the master position. With that out of the way, set your second drive to the “slave” position. Mount the drive in the case below the first hard drive. Leave a space between the two, if possible, to cut down on heat related problems. Plug the second (middle) IDE ribbon wire plug into the drive. Then plug the “molex” power plug into the drive. Leave the cover off for now. Plug the computer in, attach the monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Turn the computer on, right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”, in the left pane select “Disk Management” and see if the new “slave” drive appears in the right pane with a new assigned drive letter. Right click on the new drive in the right pane and select “Format” after the drive is formatted it will be ready to use. I would select the largest capacity (most GBs) hard drive out of the bunch to install into your computer.

3. Paul S.
   Posted February 28, 2010 at 11:20 am | Permalink

   If its completely fouled and destroyed the disks, nothing can be done.If it’s just rendered the drive useless under normal operating circumstances, something can be done. I don’t know if there are any services near you, but a reputable computer store that really knows what they’re doing can do forensic-level recovery operations to the physical disks. If you don’t feel like spending the money but still want to give it a whirl, you can pull apart the drive, remove the disks, and then put them into another identical Maxtor. Then you can just keep switching out disk sets as you want.

4. Porf82
   Posted February 28, 2010 at 11:42 pm | Permalink

   open your computer and see if you have a space in thier to put it you might need to buy a sata cable if you dont have one

5. None
   Posted March 1, 2010 at 11:46 am | Permalink

   It should be a direct replacement. You will need to either take the bottom case off, or find the hard drive access panel on the bottom of the laptop. You should be able to remove the old drive, put the new drive right back in (the drive might have a caddy that it is mounted in, you will need to mount the new drive in that before you put it back in). You will then of course have to install a new operating system. Then you should have a working computer.

6. Hush Lee
   Posted March 1, 2010 at 11:36 pm | Permalink

   I run a number of drives from just a converter board an cable. However, for safety you should really have the drive in an enclosure.That said, proper hard drive enclosures are quite expensive. the IDE adaptor that comes with CD/DVD enclosures is perfectly usable on IDE hard drives – and with a set of 3.5″ – 5.5″ drive-bay adaptors (should only cost a few dollars) you can put your hard drive in the much cheaper CD/DVD enclosure.In fact, I recently bought an external IDE CD-RW drive to use the enclosure as this was much cheaper than buying a hard drive enclosure.Now, the other option is simply to create a basic enclosure for your device, or something sturdy to mount it on.

7. David P
   Posted March 2, 2010 at 11:21 am | Permalink

   all ok, barr the graphics, spend a few bucks to upgrade, depending on what you opt for a psu upgrade may be required also…….but at that price, a good deal…………at the end of the day it depends what you want to use it for…………..

8. Andrew
   Posted March 2, 2010 at 11:28 pm | Permalink

   Go onto maxtor’s (now seagate’s) website and download their diagnostic software, the one that you boot off of. (either cd or floppy) and it should be able to detect your drive and run a quick or thorough diagnostic. It will also give you info as the drive’s serial # and model #. If it also shows 12gb then I would RMA it back to seagate.

9. Karz
   Posted March 3, 2010 at 11:11 am | Permalink

   Just look for a bigger ATA 133 7200 rpm drive. A bigger drive may have 8mb or bigger cache. You can make it a slave drive and still boot from the old drive. OR you can make the new drive as Master (boot drive) and configure your old drive to work as slave drive, thus still accessible.However, if your motherboard has SATA ports, better buy a SATA drive. You may still opt to boot from the old drive or you can configure BIOS to make the SATA drive as boot device.

10. FOX
    Posted March 3, 2010 at 11:05 pm | Permalink

    Isn’t a DiamondMax Plus 9 hard drive a SATA drive? If it is a SATA, there is no master or slave settings because they each have their own cable! That is probably why you can’t find the jumper, there isn’t one!!!! If I’m wrong (it happens sometimes) and it is an IDE drive, than the jumper should be between the IDE ribbon cable and the power cable! You should also have a key on top that tells you what each set of pins are!

11. James D
    Posted March 4, 2010 at 11:26 am | Permalink

    Up until recently I ran CS:Source on an X2 4200+, Geforce 6600gt, 1GB DDR1 RAM, and it ran beautifully on almost max settings.Long story short, yes- it will run quite well.

12. Tech
    Posted March 4, 2010 at 11:54 pm | Permalink

    Your hard drive is not an IDE hard drive that you would put into your computer. Most hard drive enclosures are made for that IDE connectors. Your hard drive is what’s called a SATA hard drive. It uses a different connector to link up to your computer. Not many enclosures are made for SATA hard drives. You can take a look around different shops such as tigerdirect.com and newegg.com. But you might not find an enclosure to support SATA

13. Penny Dreadful
    Posted March 5, 2010 at 11:32 am | Permalink

    When you say, “unsaved files,” do you mean that they weren’t saved to the HD, or just that they weren’t saved to a backup copy? Because if it’s the former, then they are gone, and this is a good opportunity to learn to backup on a regular basis. (Yeah … it’s never worked for me, either. 8-D) But if it’s the latter, there’s software available for you to go hunting for the data yourself, and it’s available at a surprisingly reasonable price.First, are you using a Mac or a Windows box? I can offer you firsthand experience with the former, but only research with the latter.For my Macs, Prosoft’s Data Rescue has NEVER let me down. I actually just used it yesterday for the first time in a few months — and it didn’t take long, since it’s designed to be very intuitive.http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php?PHPSESSID=cf62c6ffc80c1a211e4c532c0b24a1d4I’ve been using it for about five years now, in both the DR Classic and DR II incarnations, and the one disappointment I’ve had was with a single folder of files that I was trying to rescue off a partition that some ungodly Norton data recovery app had hosed completely — just wiped clean. (I sent them a firmly-worded but polite letter pointing out the irony of this situation, only to recieve the single rudest reply I’ve ever recieved from a CSR — I mean, that woman was just plain hostile. They subsequently got moved from my “On Notice” board to my “Dead to Me” board.) Aside from that one folder (which was anguishing at the time, but ultimately not a big deal — I just lost some ultimately irrelevant e’mail that I hadn’t backed up), DR has come back with everything I’ve sent it out to fetch. I worked on my HD last summer for a week trying to recover data that had been hosed by VileFault — I mean, FileVault (“Dead to Me”). It had been a couple of years since I’d done a full restore of the drive, and it managed to recover e’mail and photos from all the way back in 2003 that I had long ago deleted — stuff I’d forgot about completely, since I no longer even know the senders. It’s VERY good.What I really like about DR II, aside from the intuitive interface, is the fact that it requires you to recover the lost files to another drive. In other words, if you’re trying to recover Drive X, it requires you to recover the files to Drive Y, the thinking being that if Drive Y is fine, but Drive X is corrupt, then you SHOULDN’T recover to it. Also helpful is the fact that you can try before you buy — it lets you scan your drive and recover one file with the demo version. This way, you can at least find out if your data even is recoverable without making the investment ($99), only to find out that it’s gone to that great bit bucket in the sky.Now, as for That Other OS. ;-} As I said, I can’t speak for this firsthand, but Prosoft now has RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC Version 2 (they had DR only for Macs when I started using them).http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc_info.php?PHPSESSID=cf62c6ffc80c1a211e4c532c0b24a1d4From the link above, it appears to be the exact same kind of app — you can preview the files before restoring them, and you restore them to an external drive. It recovers Microsoft Windows file systems including Windows Vista, 2003, XP, NT, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.x and DOS, and costs $129, though a trial version is also available.(I can also tell you that if you decide to use either of these, Prosoft’s CSRs are fast and friendly — they’ve made it to my “Fantasies” board. 8-D)Best of luck!

14. Andrew S
    Posted March 5, 2010 at 11:21 pm | Permalink

    Who knows? There is far more to a computer than its graphics card and hard drive. What processor, memory, and motherboard it has for instance.

15. rockstar911the 2nd
    Posted March 6, 2010 at 11:16 am | Permalink

    SATA all the way, but if you want to get a 10 000rpm one, make sure you don’t need it to be too big. The largest 10 000rpm that they have is only 76GB and they are quite expencive. If you want to put games on, you will at least need 2, and becides for games you will be fine with a 7200rpm. I would just get a regular 7200rpm SATA. Speed-wise, there is not that much of a difference between the 10 000 rpm and the 7200rpm unless you are running crazy programs (games are not “crazy programs”), however there is a strong difference in the price.Hope this helps! =)

16. apollomallo
    Posted March 6, 2010 at 11:49 pm | Permalink

    Hi there.Just take the old drive out of the blown machine. Take a look at the back of it. You’ll see where the ribbon cable plugs in, and the 4 wire power plug. Unplug these, unscrew the drive from the chassis.Then change your jumper settings, in between where the ribbon cable and the power cable plug in, you’ll see several metal pins. Over two of these pins will be a little white or black piece of plastic. This will currently be over the MASTER pins… Look on the drive, it will explain what the setting is for MASTER, SLAVE, and CABLE SELECT. You want to move the little white or black jumper from MASTER to SLAVE.I know this sounds complicated. but you can do it.Once you’ve done this. Put the drive into your new machine, take a look at the ribbon cable thats going into the hard drive in you new machine, there should be an extra plug on it to plug in a second hard drive. Plug the new hard drive in. And connect the power plug back to it.Start your computer, look into my computer in windows. and you’ll see the old hard drive!!!Good luck. If you need more help, leave a message for me here.-Patrick

17. butchell
    Posted March 7, 2010 at 11:39 am | Permalink

    the problem is not a bad pcb board, it is the firmware, here is a site with suggestions that have worked for other peoplehttp://forums.onforce.com/viewtopic.php?p=30550, thewy say someitmes just leaving it on for a few hours running might reset the firmwarelooks like the only other alternative is to send it get datarecovery and repair, or get the bios and repair kit for 400.00 from chinasorry