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Maxtor firmware failure/corruption

Firmware corruption is the most famous problem maxtor drives have! Main part of firmware is stored on the platter in so-called System(Service) Area. System Area occupies the negative cylinders, usually on the inner diameter and contains a number of firmware modules. If one of the modules becomes corrupted the whole hard drive micro-operating system can’t boot up, the drive can’t initialize correctly and stops working. If this situation occurs the drive becomes identified with its factory alias(N40P, CALYPSO, SABRE, GRIZZLY etc) quote often with 0 capacity. If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get “Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter” or “Primary Master Hard Disk Fail” or “No operating system found” or “USB Device malfunctioned” error or “S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed” or some other BIOS error.

Firmware corruption is not problem common users can handle and find data back at home, it requires professional data recovery engineers with professional data recovery tools. The good thing is, it doesn’t usually require opening the HDD in clean room and ordering donor drives, so data recovery in this case shouldn’t be too expensive.

Maxtor “Musical” hard drives and high rate of bearings failures

Maxtor hard drives are also well-known for their line of “musical” hard drives which have very high rate of bearings failures. When this occurs spindle gets stuck and motor voice coil starts producing nice futuristic cell phone melody or siren: . Data recovery in such case involves removing platters from such musical drive in class 100 clean room environment and transplanting them into matching donor. This complex and precise procedure requires a lot of experience and use of specialized in-house tools to maintain platters in alignment.

Maxtor PCB components damage

Damage to the components on the cirquit board(PCB) is another common failure for Maxtor hard drives. Maxtors are very vulnerable to overheating, power surges and bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to burn spindle motor controller chip on the logic board. Should this occur the computer would reboot itself, you would normally notice acrid smoke and smell coming from your PC and when powered on the drive would not spin up at all.

Maxtor hard drives’ clicking, knocking or beeping sound

The drive spins up and the head starts clicking right from the beginning with a regular constant sound. Most often this a sign of bad heads, but before doing any clean room work, it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption that sometimes could also cause clicking.

Maxtor Bad sectors failure

Bad sectors problem is one common problem for all kind of hard drives, Maxtor hard drives as well.

After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Whenever the drive hits such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop the drive immediately and consider sending it to a data recovery lab for diagnostics. Any further attempts to read it would just add up to the problems and make more data unrecoverable.