Re: will diskpatch help (this was originally under another thread. I re-entered it here because I had not gotten a response back after a week or so). I'm still fighting with this disk drive. Thanks, Scott

LAST POST IN THREAD BELOW:

Hello and thanks for the reply Joep.

My wife, Tove, and I were recently in your country visiting family of hers. I have visited there many times myself.

I was doubting hardware just because it is a beefy Dell workstation that has been operating fine for a year or so and had this error happen right in the middle of a copy operation - but of course when parts go bad they just go bad - no matter what you are doing. I have looked at the drive in another system and it too shows the drive as unpartitioned.

The drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8, 40GB, ATA/133, dated 27Jul2003.

The Maxtor has several tests, however, after over 6 e-mails to them it was still uncertain as to which ones "might, or might not" write information in the partition area to run the test.
I ran only the quick test which reported a fine drive (although it did indicate a SMART error) because the other more comprehensive testing "might" ruin any further recovery chances.

Thanks for the assistance and best regards,
Scott

Product you are using: diskpatch

Operating system / Service Pack: Win XP

Size of subject harddisk: 40G

Hello,

I read in the PowerMax user guide (http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/manuals/powermax_guide_en.pdf): "Low level format, quick or full test, these tests are data destructive". The DiskPatch read/write test does about the same thing as the low level format, but is not data destructive; each sector is read and written to while the data is preserved except for those sectors that can not be read correctly. Alternatively you can try to clone the disk with DiskPatch, all readable data will be transfered to the other disk.

"I ran only the quick test which reported a fine drive (although it did indicate a SMART error)"

In which case it would be interesting to see what SMART attribute is concerned. Maybe it's good idea to get SMARTUDM: http://www.sysinfolab.com/download.htm

If you have that tool create a report I can have a look at it of you want. Keep in mind that SMART errors are supposed to pop up if a disk is about to fail. Cloning it so that we at least have the data of every sector that can be read may become a best option.

--
Kind regards,
Joep