SATA Drive Issue

I have a 160GB Maxtor SATA drive (Primary) in my main PC along with a 120GB IDE Maxtor (data).
Abit NF7-S Rev 2
1.5GB of PC3200
Radeon 9800 pro

Its been working fine for a few months now, however a few days ago, when starting up the PC, it was really struggling to boot up (e.g. HAL.DLL missing, hanging...) - I managed to get it into windows once and immediately did some backing up of some data (most important stuff like photos), but didn't have a huge amount of time and decided to run AVG on it to see if there was a virus (had to go out).

When I came back, AVG and the computer had hung. Since then, I have not been able to boot from the drive at all.

I set-up the secondary drive (IDE) with Windows again and can boot up fine again and in the BIOS have removed SCSI as any of the boot options, however whenever I re-connect the SATA drive (even though its not a boot option), it will again not boot into windows.

So I need to know :
- Is there any way of determining whether the drive is the problem?
- Is there any way to boot and try to get whatever further data I can off it?
- Do you think it is a hardware issue (return) or would a low level format fix it)?

Thanks in advance for any help, there is still some data (Outlook files, music collection, home videos...) that I would like to salvage if possible.

[matt_ward]

I had exactly the same problem with the same drive... As this post is really old what happened to your drive???

I had 4 partitions setup on mine a primary and an extended with 3 partitions.

One day i just got a stop error and everytime i tried to access the drive it was clicking and tapping then clicking and tapping... I had only had the drive for 3 weeks as well. Anyway... i lost all my data and the company i once loved i am having real mental issues with them now as i really like Maxtor drives. Anyway... i resigned to the fact the data was now gone... and thought best clean everything off the drive and take it back to the store... so after a few attempts i cleared off all partitions. Then Formatted it as one drive... then... it starts to work again??? so why was it failing... thought right gonna zero the drive and do a surface test on this bugger... it was gonna take about 50 hours and i had to go away for 2 weeks and thats how i have left it for now... Perhaps SATA drives dont like partitions... Who knows? Anyone?

[Blackice]

Are you overclocking? SATA HATES overclocking.

[C_deck]

a partition is like a file stored on a specific location on the hdd so that's not the cause.

a corrupted boot record will do that.

you can turn on s.m.a.r.t. (it keeps a record of timed operations to monitor the health of the hdd) in the bios.

[matt_ward]

Well not really i have my bios setup to have the memory timings set to maximum performance...

Still not sure if i still trust this drive anymore. (Why would it work Ok for 3 weeks then die like this... then start to work fine when i remove the partitions and re format it.)

MMmmmm trust is a hard thing to replace.

[C_deck]

it could have been a power spike when saving data to the disk. all you can do for now is monitor. use s.m.a.r.t.