Strangeness with a Maxtor 80GB hard drive out of a 2400

Recently, my friend had a problem with his Dimension 2400, about 3 years old
or so, as it decided it would not boot up. He got a blue screen, then a
black screen and an error message (fatal error) referring to the boot.ini
file. The drive is an 80GB capacity Maxtor.

He took the drive out of the system and dropped it off at a tech shop he
uses for just such an issue. The techs called him back a day later and told
him they tried their best to get all his data off the drive, but they
"couldn't get Ghost to run on it". The drive was toast. They had some of
his data burned to a DVD for him and sold him a 40GB drive to replace the
faulty drive.

I put the bad drive in an enclosure, plugged it into a USB 2.0 port on his
Dimension 2400, and it was instantly recognized as a logical drive.
Puzzled, I ran scandisk and let it run while we drank a cold beer. I
expected to see disk errors all over the place. Nope! Not one error was
reported. No bad sectors, nothing! A perfectly healthy drive was
indicated.

But, and here is where it gets strange, his data was scattered all over the
drive. The directory structure of the drive was still intact, all the
folders he had created were still there, but in the folder where all his
client data was kept, it was chaos. Files that should have all been in
Folder A were in Folder A and B and C and so on. Some of his data, about
30% of his client files, were gone. Not a trace of them anywhere. A quick
check of drive usage confirmed they were gone. The DVD that the techs had
been able to burn for him contained only about 40% of his information,
including some of the files I found on the hard drive.

A week goes by. He calls me and informs me that while checking the old hard
drive in an attempt to recover more of his files, ALL of the missing 30% of
his files were now back. They were scattered all over the place, in places
like his My Documents folder, just laying around in the Program Files
folder, and some just hanging out in the C:\ drive. In addition, he now has
eight instances of the My Documents folder in C:\Documents and Settings\His
Name\blah blah blah.

What happened? The techs have no explanation. They just say something like
that should not be possible. They insist the drive was not recoverable when
they received it. This drive has functioned without issue as an external
hard drive since then.

"Kevin" <> wrote in message
news:463159da$0$497$...
> Recently, my friend had a problem with his Dimension 2400, about 3 years
> old or so, as it decided it would not boot up. He got a blue screen, then
> a black screen and an error message (fatal error) referring to the
> boot.ini file. The drive is an 80GB capacity Maxtor.
>
> He took the drive out of the system and dropped it off at a tech shop he
> uses for just such an issue. The techs called him back a day later and
> told him they tried their best to get all his data off the drive, but they
> "couldn't get Ghost to run on it". The drive was toast. They had some of
> his data burned to a DVD for him and sold him a 40GB drive to replace the
> faulty drive.
>
> I put the bad drive in an enclosure, plugged it into a USB 2.0 port on his
> Dimension 2400, and it was instantly recognized as a logical drive.
> Puzzled, I ran scandisk and let it run while we drank a cold beer. I
> expected to see disk errors all over the place. Nope! Not one error was
> reported. No bad sectors, nothing! A perfectly healthy drive was
> indicated.
>
> But, and here is where it gets strange, his data was scattered all over
> the drive. The directory structure of the drive was still intact, all the
> folders he had created were still there, but in the folder where all his
> client data was kept, it was chaos. Files that should have all been in
> Folder A were in Folder A and B and C and so on. Some of his data, about
> 30% of his client files, were gone. Not a trace of them anywhere. A
> quick check of drive usage confirmed they were gone. The DVD that the
> techs had been able to burn for him contained only about 40% of his
> information, including some of the files I found on the hard drive.
>
> A week goes by. He calls me and informs me that while checking the old
> hard drive in an attempt to recover more of his files, ALL of the missing
> 30% of his files were now back. They were scattered all over the place,
> in places like his My Documents folder, just laying around in the Program
> Files folder, and some just hanging out in the C:\ drive. In addition, he
> now has eight instances of the My Documents folder in C:\Documents and
> Settings\His Name\blah blah blah.
>
> What happened? The techs have no explanation. They just say something
> like that should not be possible. They insist the drive was not
> recoverable when they received it. This drive has functioned without
> issue as an external hard drive since then.
>

I don't know what happened or how the directories became corrupted/scrambled
like that, though I don't find the description shocking or entirely
surprising.Your friend is hugely fortunate to have his data back.

I do know that I wouldn't trust that drive for a single second with any data
of value from this point on.

Interesting post though.

Stew

My first rule of thumb is to not trust a Maxtor drive.
My second rule of thumb is to stop using a Maxtor drive that has shown any flaky
symptoms.
I absolutely won't put a Maxtor in any system I resell.

Two possible explanations for all the problems:

1. Failed C2032 CMOS battery in the Dimension 2400. Failed CMOS batteries
cause all sorts of odd symptoms. The system could have booted on the 2400 and
the CMOS could have been corrupted resulting in a faulty drive geometry, and a
mess afterwards.

2. The people in the shop who tried to ghost the drive could have installed the
drive on a system incapable of handling the drive geometry seen by the Dimension
2400. In this age of BIOSes that are almost identical in the handling of hard
drives, this is unlikely. But you never know.

Once Ghost failed to run (and this happens often with any drive cloning software
and a flaky drive), the people at the shop make best efforts to scavenge the
drive for any useful data and recorded it onto a DVD.

Semi-finally, scandisk totally sucks as a hard drive diagnostic tool. It was
written by the Redmond morons and it has to find its way through layers and
layers of Windows to run. I would not trust the results of scandisk, nor would
I EVER trust its ability to reassign bad sectors to spares. Instead, always,
always, always use the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics (free downloads
all) to determine the health of a drive. If the drive is a Toshiba, those
fools are the only ones still in the industry unwilling to provide free hard
drive diagnostic software, so use Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) on Toshiba
drives.

Finally, to see the true state of a drive, you need to know if any bad sectors
have ever been assigned to spares. For this, you need to see the SMART data
kept on the drive. Here is a good free tool to do so.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

I will bet that the OP's Maxtor has some bad sectors and a high number of
retries due to errors in its SMART data... Ben Myers

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:37:36 -0500, "S.Lewis" <> wrote:

>
>"Kevin" <> wrote in message
>news:463159da$0$497$...
>> Recently, my friend had a problem with his Dimension 2400, about 3 years
>> old or so, as it decided it would not boot up. He got a blue screen, then
>> a black screen and an error message (fatal error) referring to the
>> boot.ini file. The drive is an 80GB capacity Maxtor.
>>
>> He took the drive out of the system and dropped it off at a tech shop he
>> uses for just such an issue. The techs called him back a day later and
>> told him they tried their best to get all his data off the drive, but they
>> "couldn't get Ghost to run on it". The drive was toast. They had some of
>> his data burned to a DVD for him and sold him a 40GB drive to replace the
>> faulty drive.
>>
>> I put the bad drive in an enclosure, plugged it into a USB 2.0 port on his
>> Dimension 2400, and it was instantly recognized as a logical drive.
>> Puzzled, I ran scandisk and let it run while we drank a cold beer. I
>> expected to see disk errors all over the place. Nope! Not one error was
>> reported. No bad sectors, nothing! A perfectly healthy drive was
>> indicated.
>>
>> But, and here is where it gets strange, his data was scattered all over
>> the drive. The directory structure of the drive was still intact, all the
>> folders he had created were still there, but in the folder where all his
>> client data was kept, it was chaos. Files that should have all been in
>> Folder A were in Folder A and B and C and so on. Some of his data, about
>> 30% of his client files, were gone. Not a trace of them anywhere. A
>> quick check of drive usage confirmed they were gone. The DVD that the
>> techs had been able to burn for him contained only about 40% of his
>> information, including some of the files I found on the hard drive.
>>
>> A week goes by. He calls me and informs me that while checking the old
>> hard drive in an attempt to recover more of his files, ALL of the missing
>> 30% of his files were now back. They were scattered all over the place,
>> in places like his My Documents folder, just laying around in the Program
>> Files folder, and some just hanging out in the C:\ drive. In addition, he
>> now has eight instances of the My Documents folder in C:\Documents and
>> Settings\His Name\blah blah blah.
>>
>> What happened? The techs have no explanation. They just say something
>> like that should not be possible. They insist the drive was not
>> recoverable when they received it. This drive has functioned without
>> issue as an external hard drive since then.
>>
>
>I don't know what happened or how the directories became corrupted/scrambled
>like that, though I don't find the description shocking or entirely
>surprising.Your friend is hugely fortunate to have his data back.
>
>I do know that I wouldn't trust that drive for a single second with any data
>of value from this point on.
>
>Interesting post though.
>
>Stew
>

Ben Myers wrote:

> My first rule of thumb is to not trust a Maxtor drive.
> My second rule of thumb is to stop using a Maxtor drive that has shown any flaky
> symptoms.
> I absolutely won't put a Maxtor in any system I resell.
>
> Two possible explanations for all the problems:
>
> 1. Failed C2032 CMOS battery in the Dimension 2400. Failed CMOS batteries
> cause all sorts of odd symptoms. The system could have booted on the 2400 and
> the CMOS could have been corrupted resulting in a faulty drive geometry, and a
> mess afterwards.
>
> 2. The people in the shop who tried to ghost the drive could have installed the
> drive on a system incapable of handling the drive geometry seen by the Dimension
> 2400. In this age of BIOSes that are almost identical in the handling of hard
> drives, this is unlikely. But you never know.
>
> Once Ghost failed to run (and this happens often with any drive cloning software
> and a flaky drive), the people at the shop make best efforts to scavenge the
> drive for any useful data and recorded it onto a DVD.
>
> Semi-finally, scandisk totally sucks as a hard drive diagnostic tool. It was
> written by the Redmond morons and it has to find its way through layers and
> layers of Windows to run. I would not trust the results of scandisk, nor would
> I EVER trust its ability to reassign bad sectors to spares. Instead, always,
> always, always use the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics (free downloads
> all) to determine the health of a drive. If the drive is a Toshiba, those
> fools are the only ones still in the industry unwilling to provide free hard
> drive diagnostic software, so use Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) on Toshiba
> drives.
>
> Finally, to see the true state of a drive, you need to know if any bad sectors
> have ever been assigned to spares. For this, you need to see the SMART data
> kept on the drive. Here is a good free tool to do so.
>
> http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
>
> I will bet that the OP's Maxtor has some bad sectors and a high number of
> retries due to errors in its SMART data... Ben Myers
>

This just might be the time and place to also get Spinrite and run it.

Spinrite is OK, but there really is nothing wrong with running the
manufacturer's diagnostics and MHDD first. This follows the reasoning that one
first diagnoses a problem, then corrects it... Ben Myers

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:05 -0700, GHalleck <>
wrote:

>
>Ben Myers wrote:
>
>> My first rule of thumb is to not trust a Maxtor drive.
>> My second rule of thumb is to stop using a Maxtor drive that has shown any flaky
>> symptoms.
>> I absolutely won't put a Maxtor in any system I resell.
>>
>> Two possible explanations for all the problems:
>>
>> 1. Failed C2032 CMOS battery in the Dimension 2400. Failed CMOS batteries
>> cause all sorts of odd symptoms. The system could have booted on the 2400 and
>> the CMOS could have been corrupted resulting in a faulty drive geometry, and a
>> mess afterwards.
>>
>> 2. The people in the shop who tried to ghost the drive could have installed the
>> drive on a system incapable of handling the drive geometry seen by the Dimension
>> 2400. In this age of BIOSes that are almost identical in the handling of hard
>> drives, this is unlikely. But you never know.
>>
>> Once Ghost failed to run (and this happens often with any drive cloning software
>> and a flaky drive), the people at the shop make best efforts to scavenge the
>> drive for any useful data and recorded it onto a DVD.
>>
>> Semi-finally, scandisk totally sucks as a hard drive diagnostic tool. It was
>> written by the Redmond morons and it has to find its way through layers and
>> layers of Windows to run. I would not trust the results of scandisk, nor would
>> I EVER trust its ability to reassign bad sectors to spares. Instead, always,
>> always, always use the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics (free downloads
>> all) to determine the health of a drive. If the drive is a Toshiba, those
>> fools are the only ones still in the industry unwilling to provide free hard
>> drive diagnostic software, so use Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) on Toshiba
>> drives.
>>
>> Finally, to see the true state of a drive, you need to know if any bad sectors
>> have ever been assigned to spares. For this, you need to see the SMART data
>> kept on the drive. Here is a good free tool to do so.
>>
>> http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
>>
>> I will bet that the OP's Maxtor has some bad sectors and a high number of
>> retries due to errors in its SMART data... Ben Myers
>>
>
>This just might be the time and place to also get Spinrite and run it.

Top Posted Here ---
Thanks for the great information Ben! Very helpful indeed. I'll get my
friend to run the Maxtor diagnostics on this thing. It is strictly a 2nd
backup drive at this point; I don't trust Maxtor drives either.

"Ben Myers" <> wrote in message
news:...
> My first rule of thumb is to not trust a Maxtor drive.
> My second rule of thumb is to stop using a Maxtor drive that has shown any
> flaky
> symptoms.
> I absolutely won't put a Maxtor in any system I resell.
>
> Two possible explanations for all the problems:
>
> 1. Failed C2032 CMOS battery in the Dimension 2400. Failed CMOS
> batteries
> cause all sorts of odd symptoms. The system could have booted on the
> 2400 and
> the CMOS could have been corrupted resulting in a faulty drive geometry,
> and a
> mess afterwards.
>
> 2. The people in the shop who tried to ghost the drive could have
> installed the
> drive on a system incapable of handling the drive geometry seen by the
> Dimension
> 2400. In this age of BIOSes that are almost identical in the handling of
> hard
> drives, this is unlikely. But you never know.
>
> Once Ghost failed to run (and this happens often with any drive cloning
> software
> and a flaky drive), the people at the shop make best efforts to scavenge
> the
> drive for any useful data and recorded it onto a DVD.
>
> Semi-finally, scandisk totally sucks as a hard drive diagnostic tool. It
> was
> written by the Redmond morons and it has to find its way through layers
> and
> layers of Windows to run. I would not trust the results of scandisk, nor
> would
> I EVER trust its ability to reassign bad sectors to spares. Instead,
> always,
> always, always use the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics (free
> downloads
> all) to determine the health of a drive. If the drive is a Toshiba,
> those
> fools are the only ones still in the industry unwilling to provide free
> hard
> drive diagnostic software, so use Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) on
> Toshiba
> drives.
>
> Finally, to see the true state of a drive, you need to know if any bad
> sectors
> have ever been assigned to spares. For this, you need to see the SMART
> data
> kept on the drive. Here is a good free tool to do so.
>
> http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
>
> I will bet that the OP's Maxtor has some bad sectors and a high number of
> retries due to errors in its SMART data... Ben Myers
>
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:37:36 -0500, "S.Lewis" <> wrote:
>
>>
>>"Kevin" <> wrote in message
>>news:463159da$0$497$...
>>> Recently, my friend had a problem with his Dimension 2400, about 3 years
>>> old or so, as it decided it would not boot up. He got a blue screen,
>>> then
>>> a black screen and an error message (fatal error) referring to the
>>> boot.ini file. The drive is an 80GB capacity Maxtor.
>>>
>>> He took the drive out of the system and dropped it off at a tech shop he
>>> uses for just such an issue. The techs called him back a day later and
>>> told him they tried their best to get all his data off the drive, but
>>> they
>>> "couldn't get Ghost to run on it". The drive was toast. They had some
>>> of
>>> his data burned to a DVD for him and sold him a 40GB drive to replace
>>> the
>>> faulty drive.
>>>
>>> I put the bad drive in an enclosure, plugged it into a USB 2.0 port on
>>> his
>>> Dimension 2400, and it was instantly recognized as a logical drive.
>>> Puzzled, I ran scandisk and let it run while we drank a cold beer. I
>>> expected to see disk errors all over the place. Nope! Not one error
>>> was
>>> reported. No bad sectors, nothing! A perfectly healthy drive was
>>> indicated.
>>>
>>> But, and here is where it gets strange, his data was scattered all over
>>> the drive. The directory structure of the drive was still intact, all
>>> the
>>> folders he had created were still there, but in the folder where all his
>>> client data was kept, it was chaos. Files that should have all been in
>>> Folder A were in Folder A and B and C and so on. Some of his data,
>>> about
>>> 30% of his client files, were gone. Not a trace of them anywhere. A
>>> quick check of drive usage confirmed they were gone. The DVD that the
>>> techs had been able to burn for him contained only about 40% of his
>>> information, including some of the files I found on the hard drive.
>>>
>>> A week goes by. He calls me and informs me that while checking the old
>>> hard drive in an attempt to recover more of his files, ALL of the
>>> missing
>>> 30% of his files were now back. They were scattered all over the place,
>>> in places like his My Documents folder, just laying around in the
>>> Program
>>> Files folder, and some just hanging out in the C:\ drive. In addition,
>>> he
>>> now has eight instances of the My Documents folder in C:\Documents and
>>> Settings\His Name\blah blah blah.
>>>
>>> What happened? The techs have no explanation. They just say something
>>> like that should not be possible. They insist the drive was not
>>> recoverable when they received it. This drive has functioned without
>>> issue as an external hard drive since then.
>>>
>>
>>I don't know what happened or how the directories became
>>corrupted/scrambled
>>like that, though I don't find the description shocking or entirely
>>surprising.Your friend is hugely fortunate to have his data back.
>>
>>I do know that I wouldn't trust that drive for a single second with any
>>data
>>of value from this point on.
>>
>>Interesting post though.
>>
>>Stew
>>