Apparent sector boundary problems on Maxtor hard disks

London and Manchester, UK
0870 140 2525

Data Recovery from Maxtor hard disk drives with incorrect sector boundaries

Background: This is an interesing fault that we sometimes encounter on Maxtor hard drives. It's quite rare but we've seen it enough times 'in the field' for it to warrant a web page.

Hard drive failure symptoms:

Recognised correctly in BIOS
Device shows as "RAW" in Windows / "The disk is not readable by this system" in Mac OS X
Allows normal filescan by recovery software but no files will be retrievable
Low level interrogation of the hard disk drive will show incorrect sector boundaries
Disk will generate occassional AMNF (Address Mark Not Found) error messages

Notes: The failure is due to a data corruption in the hard drive's service area. It is possible to gain access to the data by correcting this corruption.

Recovery Possibilities: Data Clinic's hard disk recovery tool can recover the data from drives with this (and many other) service area faults, or you can send the disk to us and we'll recover it for you.

What should I do?: Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0870 140 2525, or fill out our auto-form and we'll call you back

Links
>> Maxtor Data Recovery section
>> Main Data Recovery section
>> A brief explanation of hard disk drive firmware

Please note that all modern hard disk drives are manufactured to very high standards, fail infrequently and have very similar rates of reliability.

Maxtor hard drive

Maxtor hard disks can sometimes develop service area problems that cause the sector boundaries to become misaligned.