Data recovery from a Maxtor DiamondMax8 with firmware corruption

Drive Model: Maxtor 6E020L0

Recognised as: Maxtor N40P

Symptoms: Although still functional, the hard drive had been running slowly for a while. When powered on one morning the disk was no longer accessible and was recognised by the computer BIOS as a Maxtor N40P.

Cause of the problem: The hard disk was suffering from bad sectors. These had become so numerous that they had overfilled the GList defects table, which had in turn developed a corruption. This corruption to the GList was preventing the hard disk drive from starting & functioning normally.

Data recovery: Although we knew the drive family was Maxtor N40P (the hard drive reports this to us when powered on) we had no further information about the hard disk as the labels both on the HDA and PCB had been completely removed. It was still necessary to correctly identify the drive”s firmware version in order to gain access to the hard disk drive”s Service Area and correct the GList corruption. The hard drive was put on our Diskmaster data recovery platform and the required Service Area data identified. The corrections the the hard drive”s firmware were then made and the user”s data once again became accessible.