I/O Hard Drive Error on 250GB SATA Maxtor Drive

[Danny]

Hi all,

On (lucky me!) Friday the 13th, my Maxtor 250GB SATA drive failed. Its connected to a Promise SATA PCI Card, and my computer specs are as follows: 2 existing SATA drives connected to mobo, 2GB ram, 3.2Ghz P4 HT.

The error:
Windows loads very sluggishly, and when I try to access the drive in "My Computer," after about 5 minutes it gives an I/O error.

What I've Done:
I tried re-seating the SATA cables. I enabled/disabled the drive in device manager, and I also rebooted many times. The Promise card BIOS detects the drive just fine upon every bootup! I have the drive disabled right now so my computer doesn't load slowly.

Why I need help?:
I have some very important data on there, including 100GB of music (and ripped CDs). I also have some important videos and pictures. Clearly data recovery for this drive (of this size) would be *very* expensive, so unless I can do it myself, I don't know if thats an option.

Any ideas?

[Thong_Ispector]

I would try two things...

Download Knoppix Live CD which is a bootable CD that will not write anything to your hard drives and see what you can save by moving data to another drive.

I would also move the 250 to one of the motherboard SATA ports to see if the problem might be in the promise controller or the drivers for it.

[Danny]

I opted for Knoppix. Wow this is cool!

I found all my data, and I ran out and purchased a 120GB USB drive. I'm actually on Knoppix right now, and I am backing up the data. I used Konquerer and dragged everything over -- but I'm at a deadly slow transfer rate. It bounces from 1.4MB/s down to 10KB/s.

Any ideas on how to improve this? It's an SATA drive going to a USB2.0 device!

[DaniBoi]

Hi everyone:
Just like danny i have a maxtor device but with only 120gb. I have over 20 gbs of music, very important notes, and photos that mean a lot. just last night it was working well, i was down to about 7gbs left. this morning when i tried to get access to the maxtor gb i couldnt and i was recieving I/O errors. windows would run sluggishly even freezing up on me. i dont want to lose everything is there anyway or maybe a trick to retreaving my stuff from this maxtor nightmare
Any help would be greatly apreciated

[goldeagle2005]

Let's check if the drive itself is a goner or not. Connect the drive to a mobo with an inbuilt SATA controller. If the computer again runs sluggishly, it's a fault with the drive.

[DaniBoi]

Goldeagle thanks! but yesterday i figured the problem,it was that i used up the whole Maxtorharddrive and that was the answer to the errors and sluggishness. but from one problem another one grew. to get my maxtor working again i used a certain software i had never used before and it removed everything in my maxtor hard drive completely. :( i lost everything... do you or anyone know of a way to retreave everything back?

[khansen46]

This reply may be a little late for this particular thread, but I personally use R-Studio to recover data. I have managed to recover data even from a formatted drive. Generally, I go to open source software first, but this has been the best product I've used. I own a consulting business, and have tried a lot of software. For data recovery, this is my first choice.

[cryogen]

OK, I'm having the same problem with my Maxtor, except mine is an external hard drive. When I connect via USB Windows XP recognizes the drive as G:, but when I try to view the contents I get the I/O error. This drive was VERY full. If the I/O error is because there's too much on it, how do I get enough off to read it and recover?

Goldeagle thanks! but yesterday i figured the problem,it was that i used up the whole Maxtorharddrive and that was the answer to the errors and sluggishness. but from one problem another one grew. to get my maxtor working again i used a certain software i had never used before and it removed everything in my maxtor hard drive completely. :( i lost everything... do you or anyone know of a way to retreave everything back?