Data Recovery Blog » Maxtor

Maxtor 2B020H1 & 6E040L0 Drives

straywasp — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:30:01 +0000

Slim Maxtor hard disk data recovery

These Maxtor slimline drives are only 16mm deep compared to the usual 22mm depth for 3.5″ hard drives. This may be the reason they have been so popular in recent years. Sometimes known as “Fireball 3″ or “DiamondMax Plus 8″ drives, they are unfortunately prone to a number of different types of failure. One of the most common fail symptoms of these drives is for them to be identified in the BIOS by an unusual name like “Maxtor N40P” instead of the drive model number. This unusual name is known as the “factory alias” or drive “family name”. When a drive displays it’s factory alias it often means it was unable to complete it’s start-up routine, which it needs to carry out to allow you to access your data. Causes range from failed PCB components, a damaged motor, or the most common cause which is system area corruption. When these drives are functioning correctly, they will remap any bad sectors they find, and save the list of bad sectors to a log file. This works fine for a while but after some time the log can become full. When this happens, there is nowhere left for the bad sectors to be mapped to, so the log file becomes corrupt. The next time you turn on your PC, the drive will attempt to read the log file and fail, displaying the factory alias instead of the model number. I have included a list of affected drive model numbers below:

2B020H1
6E040L0
2F040L0
2F030J0
2F040J0
6E030L0
2F020J0

For more information or to enquire about our data recovery services then please contact us by clicking here

Free Seagate Firmware Recoveries

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:51:00 +0000

It appears that Seagate are offering an unusual free data recovery service to customers affected by a recent firmware bug. The bug which affects certain 7200.11 drives, DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 drives, makes the disks inaccessible when the host system is powered on.

The read link has not been working but keep trying as I did get to the page eventually.

A Maxtor Head Crash

straywasp — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:28:00 +0000

A Maxtor drive with a head crash

Here is a perfect example of why you should not attempt data recovery on a failing hard drive. This Maxtor 6Y160P0 drive was sent to us after being attached to a PC as a slave and then spun up and down repeatedly in a data recovery attempt. Needless to say the telltale crunchy spin-up was heard and we headed into the cleanroom to check out the damage. It was not a pretty sight. So much of the magnetic coating had been scraped off that there was a layer of soot on all of the components inside the hard drive enclosure. Even after a deep clean, debris and rough edges would wreck a new head mechanism in seconds, rendering any further data recovery attempts pointless.