Here are some more information for Maxtor Diamondmax:

Seagate Barracuda & Diamondmax Drives are Dying En Masse Due to Firmware Bug. Seagate Reacts

Seagate hard drives from the Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and SV35 families, Seagate FreeAgent® , and Maxtor OneTouch® 4 may become inaccessible when the host system is powered on.  In other words, they turn into bricks.  If you are unfortunate to have one of these products and have not upgraded the firmware (i.e. if you are unfortunate enough to have one of these products and don’t cruise the Seagate support site on a regular basis), then a firmware bug will instruct the disk to turn itself into a brick some day when you power it up.  Do NOT power off any computer that has the following disk drives until you check the firmware.  Seagate is quietly offering free disaster recovery assistance, firmware updates, and software to determine if you have a disk that is running the evil firmware.

Once a drive has become affected the data becomes inaccessible to users but the data is not deleted.  Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured in December 2008. Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive to prevent this condition.

The following are potentially affected models. It is important however to use the Seagate online serial number validation tool to verify whether or not your specific drive is affected as not all drives of the same model necessarily share the same firmware revision.

ST31000340AS
ST31000640AS
ST3750330AS
ST3750630AS
ST3640330AS
ST3640630AS
ST3500320AS
ST3500620AS
ST3500820AS
ST31500341AS
ST31000333AS
ST3640323AS
ST3640623AS
ST3320613AS
ST3320813AS
ST3160813AS
ST31000340NS
ST3750330NS
ST3500320NS
ST3250310NS
STM31000340AS
STM31000640AS
STM3750330AS
STM3750630AS
STM3500320AS
STM3500620AS
STM3500820AS
STM31000334AS
STM3320614AS
STM3160813AS

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Further information including live links to the Seagate serial number test program and screenshots can be found at:

http://storagesecrets.org/2009/01/alert-seagate-barracuda-diamondmax-drives-dying-emergency-actions-required/

About the Author

Over 20 years in storage/peripherals business.

My hard drive crashed. How can I recover unsaved files without using an expensive data recovery service?

This is a 120 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 hard drive from a desktop computer.
The files I did not save are photos and songs. They are on the hard drive, but were never backed up to a disc.

When you say, "unsaved files," do you mean that they weren't saved to the HD, or just that they weren't saved to a backup copy? Because if it's the former, then they are gone, and this is a good opportunity to learn to backup on a regular basis. (Yeah ... it's never worked for me, either. 8-D) But if it's the latter, there's software available for you to go hunting for the data yourself, and it's available at a surprisingly reasonable price.

First, are you using a Mac or a Windows box? I can offer you firsthand experience with the former, but only research with the latter.

For my Macs, Prosoft's Data Rescue has NEVER let me down. I actually just used it yesterday for the first time in a few months -- and it didn't take long, since it's designed to be very intuitive.

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php?PHPSESSID=cf62c6ffc80c1a211e4c532c0b24a1d4

I've been using it for about five years now, in both the DR Classic and DR II incarnations, and the one disappointment I've had was with a single folder of files that I was trying to rescue off a partition that some ungodly Norton data recovery app had hosed completely -- just wiped clean. (I sent them a firmly-worded but polite letter pointing out the irony of this situation, only to recieve the single rudest reply I've ever recieved from a CSR -- I mean, that woman was just plain hostile. They subsequently got moved from my "On Notice" board to my "Dead to Me" board.) Aside from that one folder (which was anguishing at the time, but ultimately not a big deal -- I just lost some ultimately irrelevant e'mail that I hadn't backed up), DR has come back with everything I've sent it out to fetch. I worked on my HD last summer for a week trying to recover data that had been hosed by VileFault -- I mean, FileVault ("Dead to Me"). It had been a couple of years since I'd done a full restore of the drive, and it managed to recover e'mail and photos from all the way back in 2003 that I had long ago deleted -- stuff I'd forgot about completely, since I no longer even know the senders. It's VERY good.

What I really like about DR II, aside from the intuitive interface, is the fact that it requires you to recover the lost files to another drive. In other words, if you're trying to recover Drive X, it requires you to recover the files to Drive Y, the thinking being that if Drive Y is fine, but Drive X is corrupt, then you SHOULDN'T recover to it. Also helpful is the fact that you can try before you buy -- it lets you scan your drive and recover one file with the demo version. This way, you can at least find out if your data even is recoverable without making the investment ($99), only to find out that it's gone to that great bit bucket in the sky.

Now, as for That Other OS. ;-} As I said, I can't speak for this firsthand, but Prosoft now has RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC Version 2 (they had DR only for Macs when I started using them).

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc_info.php?PHPSESSID=cf62c6ffc80c1a211e4c532c0b24a1d4

From the link above, it appears to be the exact same kind of app -- you can preview the files before restoring them, and you restore them to an external drive. It recovers Microsoft Windows file systems including Windows Vista, 2003, XP, NT, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.x and DOS, and costs $129, though a trial version is also available.

(I can also tell you that if you decide to use either of these, Prosoft's CSRs are fast and friendly -- they've made it to my "Fantasies" board. 8-D)

Best of luck!

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