[ Outline ] · Standard · Linear+ Maxtor HD Fail Help needed

My Maxtor D740X-6L 40GiG hard drive desapeard from my C:\

It has no operating system on it has 2 partition and its used for storage only Downloads.

it just stopped working i tried all kind of sttup deferent connection but with no luck

Bios see's it, Hardware Manager see's it but when i come to C:\ its not there i changed cables and even tried deferent Box another comp. same thing.
And one more thing i relised as soon as i hook it on the bootup time is going up to 10min
and when i take it off the box the bootup is back to normal.

Please if anyone can help me with this

thank you

The first step is to determine if the issue is a hardware problem.

I suggest using the Partition Magic boot floppies to load PM. If PM can see the drive and partition info from DOS, then your issue is likely to be with Windows, not the HD.

If you can see the partition via PM, check to see what it says about the type and status for any/all partitions on the drive.

If the drive seems to be physically okay, then you might want to immediately run a disk clone tool such as Ghost or Drive Image to copy the entire drive to a partition on another drive. After the clone, I would run SpinRite 6 on this puppy to see what it can recover.

Good luck.
-ManX