Ok, the problem is:

"A Disk Read Error Occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart"

So, i used another hard disk as the primary, and de "damged" on as secundary..

I don't have acces to that hard disk:

the model is:

Maxtor 6y120l0
Serial #: y328jdte
Firmaware: yar41bw0

i have tried everything i can think of, i even downloaded the PowerMAX utility to see if the hard disk was truly damaged, and no, every test passed.. correctly.. so..


I have very important data on that hard disk, please help!!!!!!

PD: I get no response from de CHKDSK command in the repair console and FIXMBR kind of freaks me... PLEASE HELP!!!!!

Have you added it to the BIOS of your machine?

I know that on my machine, to add a drive, I have to manually tell the bios to find the new drive...

well heres a list of options: 1) you have a faulty disk in the drive (take it out )
2) you have a busted disk drive
3) you have a screwed up computer...
you should probably just leave your computer off for a little while...

It's not the BIOS, the drive is recognized by it... i mean, i can see the drive when the pc boots, and even on windows, i just don't have acces to it...

All the tests for phisicall damaged where fine. I know the problem can be solved by formating, but i'm afraid that might affect the opotunitie to recover data from the disk.

Leaving the pc off.. humm... i tried that already, that was my first reaction to the proeblem.

I'm not afraid about loosing the hard disk... i know it can be fixed.. i'm afraid about loosing my data!!!!

HELP!!!!!

Ah maxtor problems. I am having that same problem intermitently right now. I had another one do it earlier this year allso. It is the wright heads going out I believe. If you have acces to a copy of knopix try booting it up and se if you can see the files on the drive that way. If that works Try to find a program called Spinrite 6.0 And give it a try. Its worth a try even if you cant get it to mount under knopix because spinrite does some pretty amazing stuff.

hmm, you say you cannot access the drive? Are you running 2k or XP? it could be a permissions problem. I say this since the utilities for checking for physical damage came out ok but the software basic fixes such as chkdsk and fixmbr don't work. Have you tried looking at the properties of the drive in windows? BTW, does it show up in windows or can you see the icon but it won't let you actually access it?

maybe his right. this probably happen when you are using NTFS. Word of advice, "NEVER USE NTFS TO STORE YOUR IMPORTANT DATA FILES". Why? because the recovery for NTFS is somewhat complicated. It is safer to use FAT32 instead. This was from my previous experience of loosing 80Gigs of data at an NTFS partition.

Heres a future advice:

Never keep copies or backups of data stuff on harddrives!!!

I have had a few harddrive problems myself, and when I finally got a cd burner, I was really happy. Now I burn all my important data stuff to cd, and sometimes I make more than 1 copy of the cds.. Safety caution you know

Check your hard disk for these cases:

1) The Hard disk's power cable is not connected properly or is out of order
2) The Hard disk's Data cable is not connected properly or is out of order
3) The hard disk is damaged, and is out of order...
4) The /windows/ folder is corrupted or may have been deleted..
5) The Hard Disk's jumper settings are not configured correctly..

I think that your problem is on the hardware failure of your hard disk.. try checking the connections and jumper settings of your hard disk..

you can use other pc to plug in your hd and retrive the data.

if there are error msg was something about "access denied", then maybe you have used NTFS. in that case, use the following;

boot your hd using original copy of PowerQuest cd. select "partition magic", and convert your NTFS file system to normal fat32. then, reboot. this should erase security entries such from the filesystem. this is the best workaround i can find about .