Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rubby]

So I have this problem right. See about 4 months ago I put in a new 160GB Maxtor internal drive which I use for documents. I know, I know, Maxtor sucks, but whatever. Now, just this morning when I went to play around a little bit I noticed I couldn't access anything in the G: (the Maxtor drive). This had happened once before and a simple restart fixed it, so I restarted. Afterwards I could access the drive but it took a good 5 mins for Windows Explorer to find it. When it did it was slow and chunky navigating the drive. The bigger folders in there (My Music; something like 30 or 40 gigs) won’t even open for like 10 mins and when it does it shows nothing in there and says it’s at 0B. As far as my system configuration is concerned everything is in working order, and if I run something like a virus scan I can physically see the scanner going through my music folder checking all the songs in there. I haven’t opened up the tower to check the connections yet because my tower is so nicely tucked away and I want to avoid this. Is there anything you guys can think of that might be causing this?

[Symp]

OK, I'll try to help. but I am only a amatur at this.

If the drive was working fine before this, its probably not the connections on the cables, but you might want to chack anyway.

Now, for some questions-
Is the drive partitioned in any way, or is it just one big drive?

If your pretty sure that you have eliminated virus/spyware as reasons, and the drive is working part of the time, you could have a bad drive. I've heard of them failing this fast before.

You best bet is probably to back everything that is on it somewhere else, and then reformat the whole thing. If the same problems keep happening after a format, your drive is probably busted. You might want to chack and see if you have a warrenty on the drive. I know most companies have a 1 year policy for hard drives.

There are a good deal of tech people on these forums, you might want to wait and see what the rest have to say.

[JJMitchell]

Couple questions:

1) Is it IDE?  This is the old standard interface so I assume it is.

1a) If yes, is the hard drive on an IDE cable with another device?  

2) What is your motherboard model?  Some motherboards are notorious for not having the best through puts on secondary devices.

[edscoble]

eh? who claimed that Maxtor suck?

[Rubby]

I just thought that was the general opinion of Maxtor.
Anyways, yes it's IDE. It's been a little while since I installed but I think it's the primary slave to by boot drive. I could be wrong though, I dont know. My mother board is an ASUS P4P800-E. I dont know if that helps.

[JJMitchell]

In that case something you can try to see if its the hard drive is to remove your CD-Rom and hook the second HD to that IDE cable as a master.  See if it still gives you fits.

I had a ASUS board that didn't like having anything as a slave but don't think that was the model.  Its a quick test though.
If its still slow chances are its something wrong internally with the HD.

[dark_15]

Replace the IDE cable (Assuming this is a PATA drive) with a spare, and check to power connector to see if it hasn't come loose.  Does the drive show up in the BIOS?

If it is still acting up, listen to the drive itself: is it making any unusual noises?  Loud clicks, or it sounds like it is constantly restarting?  If so, run a the disk diagnostic from Maxtor's webiste and back up any data you have on it.  It really sounds like you're going to need an RMA, and really soon.