he;lp my IDE drive sucks and won't work

Here's what's going on with the damn thing

I bought this 200 gig Maxtor Diamondmax 10 IDE drive about a year and a half ago. It worked perfectly, as did my 160 Western Digital (can't remember the model of that one)

My 160 got a bluescreen error on boot a few weeks ago saying "unmountable boot volume" - I was too lazy to scandisk it at the time, so I just booted to a Knoppix disc for the next two weeks. Finally I got sick of not being able to write to the hard disks, and did the following exactly:

a) Unplugged the IDE cable and power connector from the 200 gig primary slave drive. Took drive out of case and put on desk.
b) Moved the master 160 drive to the back of the HDD carriage, changed the jumper to explicit slave.
c) Took an old 80 gig drive that had SMART errors (because I dropped it on a concrete floor two years ago) yet still booted, on which I had installed a clean copy of XP a year and a half ago and then abandoned because it kept giving me boot errors.
d) The 80 gig booted fine, then entered scandisk mode on the slace drive's primary partition. Scandisk found some file system errors and fixed them.
e) Shutdown, unplugged machine.
f) Moved 160 gig drive to master position, set the jumper exactly the way it was before, and put the 200 gig drive back in. Turned on computer.
g) Now my 200 gig drive is not recognized at all in the BIOS, in either my home machine or my work machine, even when it's the only thing on any of the two IDE buses I have. I've tried every single jumper setting and cable position combination with both drives, and the 200 gigger just isn't seen. I can hear it spinning up and the little faint ratchet noise that means it's seeking, but it doesn't get recognized.

I'm considering putting the damn thing in the freezer in the break room, but don't know how long to put it in for, or when I will be in danger of condensation affecting the circuitry of the drive. I don't think it's been dropped lately either

>Maxtor
Problem found.

HDDs are funny because if you look at individual experiences with them, everyone has one brand they hate or love, but if you ask enough people you realize that any of Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Samsung are all equally good, but none are perfect. some people have terrible luck with one brand or another and great luck with some other brand.

I doubt the freezer will help you. Condensation? A few minutes tops, to be safe. You can try using the thing on a USB->IDE connection and see what happens.

>>3
I've yet to see a person who likes Maxtor.

>>4
Well it changes today, here I am. Maxtor 4 life!

>>1
Did you perhaps bend pins on it?

>>5
Seagate bought Maxtor so your life is over, but yeah, I've never had a Maxtor drive fail me and I own 14 of them.  I always end up just replacing them because they get too small to be worth keeping in my cases.

>>7
Actually, I knew that. But same in my case, never had one fail me either, at least so far - one of them has been working for 3 years in a server so that might need replacing. But I really don't want to

If people stopped zapping their fucking hard drives they wouldn't fail as much. Too many people dont know shit about esd and hard disks.

>>6

Pins are perfectly fine.

>>10

2 reasonable possibilities.

1. Faulty Data Cable (doubt it from description)
2. Faulty hard drive

Pick one

Try drive in a friends computer perhaps, just to make sure wether it's dead.

>>1
If you have a Xin XP CD you life is saved. I got the same bosd. unmountable boot volume. All you have to do is boot from CD and then got to recover console when it says so usually after the CD is done loading all that stuff. Then type in chkdsk. there should be prefix such as /r /p but I forgot which one is what. After chkdsk type in fixboot. when that is done, restart, computer fixed.

>>12

If you would read the thread you would see that I fixed the Unmountable Boot Volume problem

Update

The drive works fine now - but in a wierd way.

  +---+------------------+---+----------------------------------------------------+---+
  |   |                  |   |                                                    |   |
  |   |                  |   |                                                    |   |
  | 2 |                  | 1 |                                                    | M |
  | 0 |                  | 6 |                                                    | O |
  | 0 |                  | 0 |                                                    | B |
  | G |                  | G |                                                    | O |
  |   |                  |   |                                                    |   |
  |   |                  |   |                                                    |   |
  +---+------------------+---+----------------------------------------------------+---+
   /|\                    /|\
    |                      |
    |                      |

  Jumper set to          This one was set
  slave, even though     to master, even
  it's in the master     though it's the
  position!              physical slave!
I CAN NOT BELIEVE IT BUT IT WORKS