Hey All - I just had a 20 month old Maxtor 3000DV 80gb FireWire Hard Drive fail on me. Most of my media became corrupt. Tons of SBP errors and finally the computer will hang if the drive is connected. I don't really care about the media on it, it is all re-creatable. My questions are:

If I could get it to mount, does this sound like it might be fixable by a reformat? I haven't heard any death knells from this particular drive. And honestly since the day I bought it, it has been flakey. I have a sister drive that is absolutely perfect.

Do you think I could open the case and pop in a new drive? Anything to look for there?

Thanks, I appreciate all you help.

Tony

The chance is pretty big that the drive is just dead. There are
special recovery tools, but those are expensive. Reformatting
might work, but basically I personally would never trust such
a drive again.

If the drive is dead why not open it up and see if it is replacable
indeed. Who knows. If it is dead, what do you have to loose.

Well first, if it indeed has always been a flaky drive, I'd definitely try to see if I could get some warranty service done.

If it is out of warranty, and even if the drive does seemingly fix from a reformat, I would never use that dern thing again. Flaky drives are an awful weak link to have in your setup, because at any point they could go out and take something priceless away with them.

80Gb drives are dirt cheap these days (relatively speaking). You should be able to just slap another one in its place. You may have a problem, however, trying to put a drive larger than 250Gb in there (I think that's the trouble-point if memory serves), as the case may not have the newer chips that allow for larger drives in external cases.

However, there should be no reason why you can't just put any old drive in there. Usually all a branded external enclosure is, is a pretty case that ultimately uses the same rebranded chip on the inside. Usually, the only reason to pick one external case over another is looks.