External HD - strange reading/sizing issue

I have a Maxtor Personal 3100 250GB external HD (well I did atleast). I d not know if this is related, but I was using Paragon Partition Manager 8.5 to format a different harddrive I going to give away. Shortly after I finished, I discovered that my external wasn't recognizing at all. I tried plugging it into multiple computers, no dice. I started to try to run some tests to discover it and it wasn't finding it at all. I took it out of the external enclosure and attached it to an USB HD reader to try and access it directly. Upon doing this it showed up in device manager disk drive section as USB Device. It was not showing up in disk management or my computer.

I booted into KNOPPIX Live and it wasn't finding it either. So I booted into the HIREN 9.5 CD to try and find it. The partition managers it could only find my internal. It wasn't until I went into HDD Regenerator 1.51 that I could see more than 1 drive. It found my internal and another drive listed as over 900GB. I started to run HDD-R on it and every sector is coming up bad, and it is going incredibly slow (some mental math says if it goes thru all 900Gb it will take about 150 hrs). It says no sectors have been recovered but I do not know if it tries as it goes or is going to try at the end.


Does someone have a suggestion on what happened, what to do about it, or at the very least, a way to pull the old data off?

 

Windows can only recognize a USB drive formatted in FAT/NTFS. If you deleted the partition, you need to create one.

 

even unformatted, shouldn't it isn't showing up in a dos based/cdbooted partition manager like partition commander? it shows up in the HD diagnostic program (seagate tools) but shows up as the 900GB instead of its 250

 

I had a similar problem once: a 320gb hard drive's detailed properties came up like this:
Total capacity: 320gb
Free space: 640gb
Used space: 1280gb
If you didn't notice, the free space is twice the capacity, and the used space is twice the free space. I had some of the not-so-bright crowd tell me "Hey, cool! You got an extra 320gb on your drive for free! I wish my drive was like that!" Duh. Obviously, something was very wrong with that drive and it was replaced for free by Seagate. I have the replacement spinning away happily in my PC as we speak. Anyway- if every sector is coming up as bad, you can try a low level format (also known as "zeroing the drive" 'cuz you'd be writing 00 across every sector/cluster) and see if that fixes it, but chances are the drive is shot. Why did this happen? Who knows. PCs are strange creatures with lives and minds of their own. All we can do is try to keep 'em happy and clean and organized, and hope for the best. Hopefully this drive is under warranty. Seagate is great with warranty returns; I registered my drive on their web site, mailed it the next day, and had a new drive about 9 days later. :-D

Good luck!

 

Well new to you but refurbished as is the policy of all hdd manufacturers in respect of warranty replacements. I know that you already knew this dlb so my comment is aimed at swiftaaronm.

Good Luck

 

Yeah, you're right RR... the drive is new to me, but not 'brand new'. It is clearly labeled from the factory as 'Recertified/Rebuilt' and I still have the rest of the warranty that was remaining on the original drive. New, the warranty was 5 years; the drive went bonkers about 18 months into its life, so I have about 3.5 years left on the warranty....

Thanks for clearing that up to avoid any possible confusion.