Musical Maxtor

[mujjuman]

Originally Posted by bigdir

mujjuman, it is my mission to now find out how to recover my data. I am going to see if I can find a Diamondmax 10 for sale somewhere and try my luck replacing bits.
If anyone knows of where to find these models (preferrably in Australia) then I would be most grateful.
I will update the forum with any useful findings...

hey bigdir, best of luck to you! you can try ebay or maybe even newegg.com. dont know if they ship to Australia though.

as for the DJ who lost his drive, wow man im sorry that happened to you, esp since you work out of that drive. my sympathies.

[edamon]

Originally Posted by ScottW

Last week I bought two 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9's and set them up in RAID 1 on an Abit KD7-RAID board. For the first 5 days or so, both drives ran fine.

On day 5, I came home and found that one of the drives in the array had failed, so I powered down, and rebooted. I then heard a series of beeps coming from the system - they didn't sound at all like normal BIOS error beeps and they seemed to be coming from the failed drive itself. I removed the drive, connected it to the power supply, and confirmed that yep, the beeps were coming from the Maxtor drive itself.

I checked maxtor's site - they claim that the drive does not contain any sort of speaker/audio output device. I recorded the beeps (http://www.techimo.com/maxtorbeeps.mp3). The drive won't even spin up at powerup. Any ideas here or did I get some sort of wicked prototype . I bought both drives from googlegear so they aren't eval/sample models.

The only thing I'd use a maxtor for is a doorstop. I've had 6 of their drives all fail (4 of them were in raid configs). 5-6 years ago maxtor was a good company, not anymore. Friend has about a half dozen maxtor paper weights as well.

The only company I trust these days with PATA/IDE drives is Seagate. Not had a problem with any of them. Plus when one company - maxtor goes to a 1 year warranty and seagate goes the other way - 5 year, I think that's rather telling.

-d

[mujjuman]

Originally Posted by edamon

The only thing I'd use a maxtor for is a doorstop. I've had 6 of their drives all fail (4 of them were in raid configs). 5-6 years ago maxtor was a good company, not anymore. Friend has about a half dozen maxtor paper weights as well.
-d

yup, thats why Seagate bought them

[fiberchunks]

Hey all,
Just got done reading this whole thread to try and resurrect my DiamondMax Plus 9. Of course, musical tones. But first, some history!

Started out about 9 months ago (I haven't touched it for fear of screwing something up!) My kid knocked it off the table in a USB enclosure, so it's entirely my fault for: 1) not backing up my data, and 2) allowing such a precarious situation to occur in the first place. I decided to try the methods mentioned here, none of which worked.

Since the only _real_ data I gave a damn about was pictures of my family (I guess we'll have to replace them all now), I decided to hack into this beasty and see what happened.

In any event, after much disassembly, I came to the conclusion that in the jarring of the drive, the motor spindle caused a burr in the shaft that bound the motor up but good. I'm now not very keen on fluid bearings. Either the burr caused it, or the fluid film in the drive somehow got contaminated (perhaps overheating of a stuck motor burns the fluid?)

In any event, I may put up some pictures somewhere of the mess that is now my hard drive, if I've the time.

I don't blame maxtor for my particular problem (that would be childish), but from what I hear from folks who _haven't_ dropped their drives, I would be heated in that circumstance.


I, for one, CANNOT WAIT patiently enough for the end of mechanical hard drives!

Live Free in Peace,

[edit] I'd be happy to ship someone the controller board off this drive if you'll pay the shipping. I can't _guarantee_ that it works, but it probably does.[/edit]

[mujjuman]

yeah man, flash hard drives would be awesome. but currently they are too expensive i think... if theyre even out.

as for losing your fotos, im so sorry. i send my sympathies, because i know how you feel.

in my case, my drive wasnt dropped or anything.. i think it simply overheated.

[wera]

Originally Posted by najevi

grungebob's explanation may have required a little imagination to interpret but what I got out of it was that

when the arm that carries the read/write heads is not moving (stuck) the stepper motor driving that arm attempts to oscillate the arm in an effort to free it up. (just as when your car tyre is stuck in mud or sand you try a "reverse then forward" motion to see if you can create enough momentum to get your tyre out of the hole it's stuck in.)
This so called "buzz routine" causes the arm and possibly other mechanical parts to vibrate (oscillate) and that is where the polyphonic sound comes from. (much like the melody that arises from the vibration of different length tuning forks or the metallic comb that you find inside one of those wind up music boxes.)
You will recall that the melody is heard 3 times after power on. These would be the three times this "buzz routine" is used in an attempt to dislodge the stuck arm carrying the read/write heads.

BTW a Maxtor/Seagate support representative that I was corresponding with via email did visit this forum to listen to the mp3 soundbyte and to read grungebob's explanation. He confirmed that it was an accurate description and said he'd refer the FAQ Q&A matter to the webmaster in charge of Maxtor's FAQ web page.

Thanks !

[DrCaligari]

Thank goodness, for this thread.
That tune started to make me crazy 3 days ago, AND many people
looked at me in disbelief when i told them.
Anyway gonna start ome taping session now :-)
Hope i get my Photoshop-Samplitude data back :-/

[Billb2468]

Yet another Maxtor DiamondMax +9 200GB going diddly-diddly-de. Computer died after restarting from a Windows update. After a couple of gos it restarted with some disk errors. Chkdsk sorted some problems, defrag tidied things up. Burnt the photos off to disk and some other files. but then it rebooted again, this time terminally.

After chasing bios beep codes and even fixing a dry joint on the graphics card which seems to have been the cause of some monitor issues, Google led me here. Bingo!

A quick twist cured the melody, so something unstuck. I can now feel the disk spinning freely when not powered up, but when it tries to boot the heads go clack-clack-clack, sounding as though they are searching a non spinning drive. I suspect the drive motor is dead.

Can't really complain though as the disk is 5 years old. I guess the old adage of you don't miss it til it's gone is true.

Time for a new drive and some more proactive management I think.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[mujjuman]

i couldnt even twist mine....

[MizztaPeppa]

OK i have a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200 gig internal in an external USB case. It's formatted for a mac which i dont have access to at the moment, but anyways. i dropped it on tile now it makes the musical noise that all these people are talking about. ive searched far and wide on the net looking for things to fix it but no luck.

The thing is i plug it into a mac and in the disk utility program it shows up BUT it says its a 2 TERABYTE hard drive when its only 200 gigs...

I plug it into a PC and it makes the ding noise and it knows its a maxtor drive plugged in USB and i run data recovery programs about 5 of them so far, and their all saying 2 terabytes as well. what gives??? i dont even know how its registering when the disk isnt even spinning...im going to try tapping again while plugged in but can somebody please write back or email me which is my name at hotmail.com

PLEASE HELP IM ALSO A DJ WITH ABOUT 190 gigs filled up. not just music but personal things as well.