Musical Maxtor

[bragle]

I also discovered this thread via Googling and have some things to add. I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 300 gb drive which I have housed in an external enclosure. I tripped over the USB cable tonight and it hit the floor, after which is made a musical chime everytime I turned it on.

Maxtor has nothing on their website I can find about it and I am going to put it in the freezer for an hour, per the suggestion of others here. However, I wanted to put my two cents worth into this discussion because it is apparent there are those who are chalking up the sounds these drives make to motor harmonics or other sources than the obvious pizo which is contained within the drives. Following is the video I shot of the drive upon powering up. Please note it is NOT connected to the computer. The only cable is the power cable to the external enclosure. The sound you hear is coming FROM the drive.


http://www.tennesseetalks.com/maxtor.mov

[capernicus]

I been having this 250gig for about 2 years now. Worked great. I tripped on the dam USB wire it was connected too just Like the last poster (bragle) and it smashed to the floor. It hit really hard. I didnt evn bother turning it back on cause I knew it was crashed. Hours later after a long nap I tried it out. LOL Dam thing is dead. Sings that song and I wondered what the hell is that? So I did the google search and here I am. I tapped and banged it. I unplugged it and threw it on the floor. Its in the freezer now. Ill probably take it apart myself and spin the platters by hand LOL I have baby pics and thousands of MP3's on this thing. I had a Seagate that died in less than a year and I didnt even drop that one so Its not a Maxtor versus Seagate or other brand thing. Its just a odds thing. Nothing is perfect. Yea it sucks to have a product for 3 days then it breaks. But that is life. I cant blame anybody but myself for the crash. To me its a dam shame that one must pay hundreds or thousand to recover a harddrive. Maxtor should offer a service of $50 or maybe $100 to get the recovery done by them. They would make $$$ money and we would all be happy. But people are feakin greedy. So tomorrow if I dont get this dam thing spinning again for a back up Ill unscrew it try to manually make the bitch spin. it that dont work Ill be so pissed i think ill beat my self in the chest. Hey at least Maxtor has this beep that tells us the drive is not spinning. Other companies dont do that. Then you would REALLY be clueless. One I take this bitch apart ill post pics and see where that music is coming from when opened!

[capernicus]

I took the dam thing apart. I found the platters wouldnt move at all! There are small holes in the spindle whic is located in the center of the platters. I stuck 2 small scew drivers inside these holes and hand cranked the platters. It took allot of force to move them. So I took a small torch and heat the bottom of thr harddrive where the motor is. I figured if I heat it up I might lossen the oil and debrit in the bearings. IT WORKED! After heating it up to very hot and hand cranking it I got it to start spinning. But wait. In the process I bent a couple prongs that have the reading heads. it now comes on and has no music but the unit doesnt read now! DAM. Id like to ask anybody out there to contact me. I need tp replace the reading arms. So I ask that if anybody has a broken Maxtor ATA133 250gig to send it to me. I will use the parts and try to fix mine. Email me please. pushinit2dalimit@yahoo.com I need to get my baby pics ad mp3's back! Unless someone wants to share there mp3's to me!

[spiro9210]

Originally Posted by bragle

I also discovered this thread via Googling and have some things to add. I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 300 gb drive which I have housed in an external enclosure. I tripped over the USB cable tonight and it hit the floor, after which is made a musical chime everytime I turned it on.

Maxtor has nothing on their website I can find about it and I am going to put it in the freezer for an hour, per the suggestion of others here. However, I wanted to put my two cents worth into this discussion because it is apparent there are those who are chalking up the sounds these drives make to motor harmonics or other sources than the obvious pizo which is contained within the drives. Following is the video I shot of the drive upon powering up. Please note it is NOT connected to the computer. The only cable is the power cable to the external enclosure. The sound you hear is coming FROM the drive.


http://www.tennesseetalks.com/maxtor.mov

I have exactly the same problem that you have. I mistakingly tripped over the usb cable and bam! the maxtor hard drive was dead in a heart beat. I am experiencing the same sound that you have posted in your movie. I can't believe tripping over a usb cable can ruin a hard drive. I have banged the living hell out of the hard drive to no avail. I thinking about opening the hard drive, but I am not sure of the consequences. Maxtor sure sucks!!!!

[Rootstonian]

Had a Quantum drive crash on me; it was after Maxtor bought them out. It doesn't "sing" but I wanted to throw my $0.02 in on this too.

Why don't they have a clean room for repairs. I think 99.9% of the failures are mechanical, but the data is still perfectly intact on the platters. I know I got quotes of anywhere from $800 to $2400 to get my data back. I don't think so.

If Maxtor, WD, Seagate would offer this service for a couple hundred or maybe even up to $500, they would make a fortune. I can't beleive that someone in management at these HD companies hasn't implemented this...they would be a V.P. in a month with all the newly generated revenue.

<edit> You know, I'm actually thinking of starting my own business in this. Yeah, start-up costs would be huge, but I would way undercharge the competition. Say $500 a drive. Say you can recover 5 a day. About $1,000,000 per year. If you can't recover the data, charge a minimal bench amount to customer and then have a refurb contract with the HD companies.

[capernicus]

like I said, greed. They want way too much money to get the data off these dead drives. Who would pay that? A big multi million dollar company but not me. I cant afford it. yea I might pay $500 since I had more than that much just in songs saved on my hard drive. I would invest in your new business. Its worth it.

----Also if you open the drive DONT TOUCH THE PRONGS THAT HAVE THE READ HEADS ON THEM. Then you will never ecover the data. the BEST WAY to get the thing to spin again is to heat the bottom of the drive where the motor is. Then when you physically have to turn the platters with small screw drives. it will work. but you must be careful. Look at my last couple posts and I explian how to do it.

[Platin465]

Well, I've got the same problem:

All of a sudden I get odd music from my pc, which went away once it got into WinXP. I noticed that my 5 partitions of my 160 Gig Maxtor Diamondmax 9 drive were missing, so I wen to reboot. This time I noticed an odd POST beep as well, and that the Promise IDE card that came with the Maxtor 160 Drive was not recognizing it. Then, I reset the BIOS to see if there was something there causing this. It took the odd POST beep away, but did not fix this. I tried putting it in another computer (no help), and through USB, hoping that it would do the recognition of the drive differently, and thus work. As with others, this did not help. I bought another drive, of the same series, hoping that if I swapped the circuit boards, this would help (thinking that the drive wasn't being seen because of a faulty board). However, I could not find the screw drivers I've used in the past to take appart hard drives. I tried hex (both SAE and metric), but none fit.

Today I found this site! I will try your suggestion of twisting, then tapping. I'll leave Freezer as last resort. I had already sent for an RMA as my warranty is about to expire. Hopefully I can get the data off.

As far as what caused it? I think I remember hearing odd clicks from the computer this used to be connected to in the past, but shrugged it off as fans (very loud system). The clicking would stop after a soft tap on the computer case. The clicking didn't happen on the system I moved this drive to though (HTPC). Other than that, I recently had taken the drive out of this new system to try to troubleshoot the primary hard drive on it. While this drive was out of the system, I twisted the drive and noticed that I would hear something moving in it. I hoped it was just the platters spinning and nothing more, but I feared it was the platters spinning and the heads touching part of it. I dont' remember if the heads are supposed to touch near the edge of the platter when parked, but I always figured that the platters would not spin while unpowered. In any case, this drive worked fine for a couple of days past that. I did have one time where I shut down using power button, but I thought that drive worked fine since then. I can't remember how many days ago that happened.

In any case, I'll post back after I try fixing it tonight. (I'm sure it'll be a shorter post)

[backtheFup]

The Maxtor drive probably says Calypso on it. That musical Maxtor DiamondMax 9 drive crashed on me beyond recovery. I found it to be quite a piece of crap drive. It came preinstalled in a Porsche enclosure.

backtheFup
http://www.backtheFup.com

[Platin465]

In short, it's working now, here's what I did:

Hooked up on it's own IDE channel as primary. Got into BIOS and kept making it try to detect the drive. Meanwhile, hit it from right-hand side while holding it with the label facing me and the IDE ribbon cable towards the floor. Then, hit it from the bottom near the IDE cable. That's when it worked. I hope this helps others.

The longer version (totally unnecesary to read, but I had already typed it, so I'll leave it):


Well, I hooked my musical DiamondMAX 9 drive back up to a computer with about 60 gigs of free space. After trying some of the suggestions here, it's working again. I was able to get all my personal and a bunch of other things off. There was about 120 Mbs of data I couldn't get off my personal data partition, but it wasn't important stuff. I don't know how this works, but that partition was alway seen as the last drive letter whenever I put this drive into another computer. It moved everything else before having issues with this last bit, and I've been able to emty out another partition and most of a third (I had partitioned this 160 Gb drive into 5). I'm going to backup the data I've gotten so far, and then get the rest off. Thank you all for having this thread and all the data gathered here to help everyone else with this problem.

Here's how I got it working:

I set this drive on it's own IDE channel. I also set a DVD burner on it's own IDE channel (as primary) to streamline burning, etc. I connected the power from an external USB/Firewire enclosure (where the DVD burner came from) so that I could turn the drive on/off while trying to get the BIOS to recognize it. I turned the USB power on, then the computer, got into the BIOS, and started scanning the primary IDE device on that channel. First, I tried the twisting, gave it about five tries of scanning/turning off&on of the drive & turning while scanning. I noticed that if I tried scanning while the drive was off, it took only a second or so to say there wasn't anything, but much longer if the drive was on (makes sense). Then, while holding the top of the drive towards me and the IDE connector closer to the floor, I tried hitting it from the right-hand side, thinking if it had something to do with that box of little balls, it would move it away from the platter (I looked at the picture again today and I guess it's too far away to actually have made contact with the platter). That didn't work either. I then powered it off and back on, set it to detect, and hit it from the bottom, near the ribbon cable. It spun up and is now working!!!

Thank you all so much!! Your posts have been and immense help in getting my data back. I'm not sure I would have noticed that the drive wasn't spinning if I hadn't come here. Just as a piece of advice, IMO, you shouldn't open a hard drive unless you can be absolutely sure you won't get floating dust to fall on the platters. It is my understanding that if anything touches the platters, the data may no longer be retrievable. I'm sure that's not the case 100% of the time (as with the first poster). I further don't think that this thread is suggesting that people open their hard drives to fix/move something inside of it to get their drives functional again. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.

[therobin]

OK perphas someone here can help me. I am experiencing this sound problem and really hoping to retrieve my music before sending the drive back to maxtor.

I have SATA 300GB maxtor (DiamondMax 10).

The HDD burnt (pis here and sound sample here: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15607226 )

Well I have wrist and tap the drive and no luck. However, before I move to more drastic steps I would like some info from those who had this problem.

When wristing the drive, did you hear the platters spin? Becuase I can hear it spin when I do that, but it still makes that strange sound when I boot it.
Also to Scott: You said the sound was coming from the air filter. How exactly did you know that? I am willing to pull the box if I can confirm that will solve the problem.