Common Maxtor hard disk failures

Maxtor hard disks have one peculiar failure associated with corrupted firmware. This kind of failure is not exclusive to Maxtor drives except it is more prevalent than any other failures.

Firmware is required to initialise and start up the drive in order to function properly. Thus, corruption of firmware will generally cause the drive to be unrecognised by BIOS or recognised as the factory alias such as Maxtor Athena, Maxtor Romulus Maxtor N40P, Maxtor Athena, Maxtor Ares64, Maxtor Calypso, Maxtor Proxima etc., after which there is no access to them. An error message will usually appear on start up, "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail".

In other cases, the Maxtor disk may make an audible ticking noise and PC system BIOS will fail to recognise the hard disk. This is symptom that the disk had a crashing head so the disk must be powered down immediately for further data rescue.

Commonly, the motor may cease to spin so the disk appears totally dead.

In some cases, the system may slow down and "CRC" disk errors start to appear. Situation may degrade over time until the system is brought to a complete halt.

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