Maxtor 1TB hdd suddenly not working...

[spereree]

I bought this 7200RPM 32MB cache 3.5" HDD about a year ago, used it on my old desktop for a while (Music production, films, downloading, etc) and recently (well, like 4 months ago) I bought a HDD eSata/USB case (Pluscom) so that I can use have my valuable contents on my new laptop (Dell Studio 1558) via e-Sata. It was all fine and good, running my old programs on my laptop, etc, till 2 or 3 days ago. suddenly stopped working, even if I plug it back up on my old PC, via USB, or internal power and Sata like before. it spins up, it tries to access the data, but fails. in My computer (on my old PC) it just shows the drive as a "local disk" and when opened, it prompts for a format. ("this disk is not formatted. do you want to format it now?") but on the bios and HD tune pro, the
drive is found, and u can even do the benchmarks as usual. maybe some time ago my PC failed to read the drive like 3 or 4 times, but a simple on/off always fixes it. but now, it seems the problem is here to stay. the HDD has never been doped. is it a HDD fail? I really need to recover my precious music I made in there. what do I do?

old PC specs:
4GB patriots DDR2;
E4600 core2duo 2.4 at 2.8 to 3GHz
(C 250GB WDC (windows XP 32bit)
(D 160GB WDC
(E DVD rom
(F 1TB maxtor (this drive)
550W PSU, ASROCK M/B etc...

Laptop:
Dell Studio 1558
2.13GHZ core i3
4GB ddr3
momentus 500GB
Windows 7 64 bit
etc.

Thanx for replying!

 

[Snipergod87]

I didnt even know Maxtor was still around let alone make 1TB drives (Maxtor is known for bad drives back in the day). If the drive is asking you to format it then you will need to use some data recovery tools to scan the drive and recover the data onto a different drive before reformating it.

When I had to recover data I used Active@Undelete but you would need to buy it. I am sure there are free programs like it.