Maxtor 40GB displays garbage

dsleesman · Post by **dsleesman** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 2:09 am

ok - i need some help.

My PC was working great (WinXP, Athlon 1.4GHz, 512 PC133, Geforce2 GTS, (2) 40GB Maxtor HDD's

All of the sudden, i boot up my computer, and my D: drive turns to garbage. In MY COMPUTER, instead of the normal title, it has a bunch of jiberish. I go into the drive, and all the files are currupt.

So... i look in "Computer Management" for that drive, and it says the HDD is "healthy" but obviously it's *NOT*. When i go into the HDD's properties, it says the drive is only a 248MB drive, and that it's in FAT (but it's really in NTFS).

Windows XP won't let me do a scandisk either.
The BIOS detects it fine.

HELP!

I've switched cables and tried out different configurations, but with no luck...
Tomorrow i'll try putting the HDD into a friend's machine to see if it works, but i just can't figure out why it would DIE ALL OF THE SUDDEN ?!?!?!?!

Thanks,

dsleesman.

sethpa · Post by **sethpa** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 7:36 am

Welcome to PCA! Now on to your problem.............

A little more info, the OS boots just fine, but when you try to run anything or go into explorer, you got garbage. I'm guessing that you have a partition just for the OS and everything else is separate, correct? Have you tried booting to Safe Mode and running scan disk? Also, have you tried a system restore? Also another possibility is a boot disk to DOS and running some diagnostics from there, outside the OS.

sethpa

dsleesman · Post by **dsleesman** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 9:30 am

Also,

I booted into WinXP safe mofe, to see if i could do a scandisk there - but windows refuses to scandisk it there too.

I can't run a scandisk from DOS, because the HDD is NTFS.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 11:30 am

Are you overclocking? If so, try clocking it normal. Some drives and controllers can't handle an off-frequency PCI bus clock and drive corruption is a classic symptom.

If you're lucky the drive data is only corrupt and you MIGHT be able to salvage it, but it sounds like you may need to FDISK the drive and reformat it I'm afraid.

Another possibility is a Virus - can you do a full Virus scan?

If you can get it into another computer running Win2K or XP then you can try doing a scandisk on it from there.

Good luck.

chottoED · Post by **chottoED** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 1:38 pm

i believe if you run chkdsk or was it chkdisk (something like that) in the XP command promt (start->programs->accessories) it'll schedule a disk scan for you on your next boot.