I have an external maxtor 500 gig hdd that i have been useing for quiet some time now , this morning i restarted my computer and booted up and went to the drive and it is telling me that i need to format the drive , i cannot do this seeing that i have over 100 gigs of personal vid/photos on it .
could somebody help me with getting around this some how?
thanks
ps. I was useing the drive this morning
pss. i am useing windows xp...
LoL no Never*cough**
no but seriously ! IDK what to do
i was going thru my hardware and a raid host controller was installed for some reason i unistalled it but still no difference dose raid have any thing to do with it? i didnt set the drive up for raid when i got it
Not too sure, but if you didn't create an array, then that hard drive isn't part of an array and everything should be fine. You need two or more drives to even create an array anyways. Sounds to be like the drive is bad, that's why it's asking you to format.
If I make a driver disk via the dd command in Linux, then try and run that floppy on a Windows system, Windows can't read the disk and it tries to format. Sounds like you did something to the drive or the drive is bad.
Maxtor drives fail in 2 ways.. they refuse to id properly and you get the "insert diskette into drive xx" error, or the other where they lose sector0 and insist they need formatting. Even if you try formatting them they will crash somewhere during the process.
Maxtor have various drive diagnostic tools out in the wild.. go find a few and try them (waste of time usually.. but it feels good to try) and see what happens.. Probably one head gone losing a full platter. I have a box full of broken maxtor drives.. they are good for throwing at people and make half decent paperweights.
Try running it on a proper internal IDEchannel and see what happens. Then the maxtor drive tools.. then bin it ;)
I will try to search for one i havent thought of that , but i am trying to do all i can not to loose the drive and my data,
>>> so much for being rated number one under external disk drives...
