question Maxtor 7345 AT data retrieval

[john01]

Hi...I have an old Maxtor 7345 AT drive that I am trying to retrieve data from, and need some help. I have hooked it up as a USB drive to a machine running WIN XP Pro. Currently I am able to see the drive in the BIOS and in device manage. However, it does not show up in either disk manager or win explorer.

I have played around with jumper settings on the drive board but still no luck.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

[Mercutio]

It would be useful to plug it straight in to something that natively supports IDE. Maybe you have an old Pentium4 or AthlonXP sitting around?
We don't really know if the problem is the USB bridge or the drive itself, so just the fact that no file systems are detected MIGHT not be the end of the world.
But, OK, you have a drive that may or may not have data on it. You don't even know.
One freebie place to start might be TestDisk, which can be run under Windows or from a Linux bootCD.

If you find that a drive magically shows up if you plug the thing in via an internal cable, RunTime Software's Get Data Back, which has a demo mode to see if it can even do anything to help you, or Recuva, which is a freebie that can help sometimes.

You should probably also download SeaTools to see if you can get enough basic diagnostics on the drive to bother doing anything. Again, it would be better to use that on a drive that's plugged in to an internal cable.

Don't mess with the jumper settings if you don't know what they do. You could be doing something goofy like putting it some weird PIO mode or limiting the disk capacity to an amount that's less than the file system presently on the drive.

You're talking about a drive that's probably more than 20 years old, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a data recovery miracle, were I you.

 

[john01]

Maxtor

Mercutio..thanks for the comments & suggestions.

I do have the manual for the drive so I am aware of the jumper settings, but anyway...good thought. I removed it from my old 486 DX machine years back and had it sitting in an anti-shock bag. Before recycling it I thought it would be nice to go down memory lane and see if there were any pics worth salvaging.

I do have an older PC with an IDE board so I will try your suggestion of setting it up as a slave drive. It is just that it would have been much simpler if I could have accessed it via USB.

Incidentally, ISO Buster is a very handy program for recovering data from corrupted media.

Thanks again

 

[Chewy509]

With a drive so old., I'm 99% certain it won't support UDMA which pretty much all USB/IDE convertors require... Unfortunately you'll need an old IDE controller that supports all PIO modes to get it to work. (FYI, Drive ID is done by PIO, but data transfer is done using UDMA in modern IDE drives).

In case you haven't found it, here is a copy of the datasheet for the 7345A to help with understanding the jumpers: http://www.4drives.com/DRIVESPECS/MAXTOR/2026.txt

Also, with a drive on this vintage (and assuming DOS), it'll be FAT16 as well... But if you're sure Win98 was used, then it could be FAT32?

 

[Mercutio]

Given the age of the drive and the fact that it apparently still has useful data, I wonder if it was pulled from some kind of non-PC equipment. One of my customers has a (photographic) film printing system that runs an operating system called ROX that originally used early-90s era x86 hardware. If something like that is the case, data recovery from Linux might be a better idea because of the vast array of weirdo file systems it supports.

 

[john01]

Chewy..thanks for your info, especially "Drive ID is done by PIO, but data transfer is done using UDMA in modern IDE drives". That likely explains why the BIOS can see the drive and why windows XP can't read/see the file structure. The drive date is May, 1993 and I suspect the 486 machine had win3.1 as the OS.

I have given up trying to hook the drive to USB, and will install it as an internal slave drive on an older IDE PC running win98.

Thanks for your comments

 

[sedrosken]

That seems like the best course of action, although you may end up with the data sitting on a useless host if you can't get it off there in some form, whether it be using floppies, a LAN, CD-Rs, or even USB drives. Windows 98 has a generic driver available for USB mass storage devices, however, it must be formatted in FAT32. No NTFS allowed here -- remember that 98 came before XP, which unified the two lines of Windows. NTFS was the primary file system of Windows NT, which was a more business oriented version of Windows. There were 3rd party NTFS drivers made available, but generally, they only allowed read access and were sometimes rather problematic.

Basically, you want to Google it. There are certain steps that you need to follow to install the driver on straight 98, and we don't know whether you are running SE or not.

To find that out, right-click My Computer and click Properties. On the window that pops up, check the version number. SE might even have Second Edition in the human-readable version string, but the string of numbers (either 4.10.1998 or 4.10.2222A) will tell you (and us) what version you're running. Straight 98 is 4.10.1998 and comes with IE 4.01, where 98SE is 4.10.2222A and comes with IE 5 to my knowledge.

 

[john01]

Sedrosken...when/if I get the old machine up and running I will let you know how things work out. If I am fortunate enough to be able to read the data, I will be able to load it on 3.5 floppies. When I set the old PC aside it was running win98 se with all the latest updates.

Thanks

 

[Mercutio]

Windows NT needed mind-boggling hardware for the early 1990s, sed. Requirements for NT 3.1 were 12MB to boot and 16MB to be functional, probably $3000 worth of just RAM at the time. If you had a PC expensive enough to have that kind of horsepower, it almost certainly had exotic 7200rpm SCSI2 disks of some sort. NTFS didn't really become a part of mainstream desktop computing until the year 2000 at the earliest. It would be somewhat shocking to find NTFS-anything on a drive of that vintage.

 

[Buck]

I agree Merc. An AT drive from a 486 DX system would, as the owner suggests, be running Windows 3.1x (or maybe DOS 6.22 (OS/2 if you're Tannin)). If the machine had a full version of 98 on it, it would likely have consumed most of the disk space. If someone did put NT on it, they would have been very upset with the performance.

 

[sedrosken]

I was referring to the flash drive that he might have been using, which I do often see formatted in NTFS these days.

I remember taking my old 1 and 2GB flash drives and formatting them in NTFS (they came to me in FAT32) to get a little extra space. Remember, these were 1 and 2GB flash drives, and I transferred literally everything with them.

 

[john01]

Hi....I managed to get a bit closer to reading the old Maxtor 7345 HD but may have finally reached a roadblock. I installed it as the only HD in a PII-233 machine containing an Abit LX6 board. The chipset is intel 440LX (82371AB). The OS is win98 SE

The BIOS is Award v4.51PG. The BIOS also says Award plug and play BIOS extension v.1.0A 1998. In the BIOS I set the master to auto detect for the HD.

Here is the problem / possible roadblock. When I boot the machine all is OK until I get the error message "The microsoft 32-bit driver (WDCTRL) validation failed at phase 03, 39. To continue starting windows without using the 32-bit disk driver press any key". When I continue, windows does start up but all I get is about a 2-inch strip at the top of the monitor showing a portion of the desk top. I am not able to resolve this issue, and can't change the screen resolution.

I did a lot of google searching and found that the problem appears to relate to HD's with more than 1024 cylinders. A Microsoft comment said that IDE drives must have CMOS settings with the following upper limits to use 32 bit disk access: cylinders 1024, heads 16, sector/tracks 63, bytes/sector 512. When I changed the first 3 (I couldn't change the 4th) the system no longer recognized the HD.

I booted the system with the win98 boot disk and could see all the directories, and the files on the root of C:\, but I don't know where to go from there. Is it possible to make changes via the boot disk in order to resolve the 32-bit access issue? Many of the search comments mentioned making changes within windows but I can't get to that stage.

Thanks again for any help you can provide.

 

[CougTek]

Can't you just boot in safe mode by pressing F8 during the Windows launch sequence?

 

[john01]

Coug.....I feel like a bit of an idiot. The old machine I'm using was running win98 but I disabled that drive and was trying to boot from the old Maxtor drive which might (?) have win 3.11. I'll have to boot from the win98 boot disk and see if I can verify this by trying to get into some of the folders. I did try to get into safe mode by holding CTRL at boot to get into the windows boot menu but the boot menu did not come up.

But thanks for your comment

 

[Mercutio]

You could also start a Linux LiveCD on that machine and probably do useful things.

 

[john01]

My problem is now solved in that I can now eventually get win 3.1 loaded, and can even run the old programs on the disk, and recover the data. The solution is a bit messy but it worked.

I still get the 32-bit driver (WDCTRL) validation error but I can work around it. Holding the F8 key at boot up ( I realized the HD has win 3.1) doesn't bring up a startup menu window, but it brings up a basic DOS program that allowed me to eventually get to the windows prompt. It was also necessary to load HIMEM.SYS. From there I ran the windows setup program and changed the video driver to the basic VGA one. Then from the DOS prompt I ran WIN.EXE and windows loaded. While in windows setup I tried loading many of the video drivers but only VGA worked. It might have something to do with an incompatibility of win 3.1 and the operating frequency of the new monitor. I believe the cause of the display issue I mentioned before was related to the video driver that was installed years back when the HD was last run .

I can't remember if win 3.1 had a startup menu?

so, I want to that all for responding to my "cry for help".

cheers....john

 

[Mercutio]

Windows 3.1 did not have a startup menu. DOS was more or less the startup menu. You could control portions of startup by editing win.ini or system.ini with a text editor (edit.com et al.) In this case, commenting out the line in system.ini will take care of the error, but IIRC that was a relatively common problem and wouldn't prevent access to the drive.

You're right that standard VGA or perhaps SuperVGA (which specifically means 800x600x256 colors in this context) are your only real video options. Windows 3.1 only shipped with perhaps a eight or 10 options and most of them would have most commonly be ISA or VLB adapters. Probably the newest hardware you'd likely find with 3.1 support would be something like a Riva TNT, S3 Savage 2000 or Matrox Mystique.

I'm glad you had a relatively happy ending in any case.

 

[time]

I don't know how you guys can remember stuff from 20 years ago with such clarity.

John, when you said "a PII-233 machine containing an Abit LX6 board. The chipset is intel 440LX (82371AB). The OS is win98 SE", I wanted to ask if you are the curator of a PC museum? My memories of this era include something about the LX chipset being inferior to the BX, and that this was Abit's heyday.

You didn't need a boot menu or safe mode in those days because you were booting from DOS and critical drivers were loaded in Config.sys et al. It was easy to edit the configuration without Windows even running. The exception would be be the dreaded 32-bit disk driver (WDCTRL) used to access the swap file - that was a problematic beastie.

 

[CougTek]

John, when you said "a PII-233 machine containing an Abit LX6 board. The chipset is intel 440LX (82371AB). The OS is win98 SE", I wanted to ask if you are the curator of a PC museum?

Or maybe he just lives in Cuba.