maxtor one touch –> dead

ImagesMy Maxtor One Touch 250BG harddrive decided to die on me last night. Major G-U-L-P was to be heard. I emailed Maxtor Tech Support to get some advice on what to do, as my warranty is up. They pretty much say: find a Data Recovery place near you and deal with it yourself, we can’t help.

Has anyone of you had the same problem, meaning, that the Maxtor external harddrive would not show any signs of life when plugging in and turning on the switch? (It’s not the power cord/adapter, I’ve tried another one) If so, any advice on what you did? And if you live in NYC, any place you could recommend that could fix this?

Oh my, the joys of the digital age!

13 Comments leave a comment below

  1. With a bit of luck is the power supply, not the drive.

    In any case, you can try Tekserve, http://www.tekserve.com/

    They recover data from one of my drives some 8 years ago from a SCSI HD. I do not remember the price, but I know it was a lot of money.

  2. Quino, thanks for the tekserve tip (outch to the price already). Unfortunately it’s not the power supply. I have a newer version of the same harddrive and tried the other powercord. No luck.

  3. take the case apart and get just the drive out. You can get a firewre or USB enclosure for less than $20 and you could put the drive into the new case. I have had several drives go because of the controller but the drive itself was fine. Good luck.

    PS-this shouldn’t be a big deal because this was your BACKUP, right?

  4. Thanks Grant for that advice. Makes sense!

  5. There was something I read recently that suggested by freezing or at least cooling the drive in a fridge overnight you can get it to boot at least long enough to get the data off.

  6. This might help:
    http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.comp.hardware/browse_thread/thread/40445a495e89f9ac/6c72ef6d030d3c3e%236c72ef6d030d3c3e?sa=X&oi=groupsr&start=0&num=3

    I’d suggest using theWestern Digital 160GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=147&Language=en
    Listed at $249. Cdn on FutureShop.ca

    Our techies rave about it and I know personally I have never had a Western Digital drive fail on me in over 20 years of computing.

  7. Thanks everyone! Your advice is highly appreciated!

  8. I would pull the drive out and attach it too a desktops secondary IDE. Boot your pc and see if it sees it, if it does the drive is fine then do what was mentioned above, go and shell out some money for another enclouser. Chances are if its power related the circuit board of the enclosure, one of the capacitors blew out. which could also be replaced, if the circuit board on the hard drive is out you can usually go out and find an exact hard drive match and pull the circuit board on that one off and swap it out. If i lived in NY, I would come and take a look at it my self, I have recovered tones of drives by doing some of the methods above, If the heads on the drive are bad you can take the platters of and place them in a new drive of exact match. But remember if opening the drive up try to do it in a clean area with little or not dust.

  9. I had a Maxtor ‘Big disk’ go down on me last year. Cost £1000 to recover files. I had same ‘don’t care’ attitude from Maxtor. Spoken to 2 other people since who both had same thing happen. Some of their drives use a RAID system to connect 2 smaller drives – splitting the data in 2 and writing half to each drive – asking for trouble! If you 1 drive dies everything is lost. Simple – don’t buy Maxtor!

  10. Maxtor One Touch

    , Lowe … No More Backup or Mac OS 9.1 or 2.0; 32MB RAM or medium without express written permission of the drive, and …

  11. Hi guys just came across this page and I have recently lost my power cord to a maxtor one touch 160gb external HD , if anyone has a spare 12v 3amp power cord laying around, I could really use it=) dont really want to pay the $100 for a new one…..please help.

    -Ken