I think I may need a real expert to help me with this... I'm having hard drives go bad literally every week... all Maxtors... although it may have nothing to do with them, I have no idea. So far I've had 5 go bad and I haven't had any luck repairing them with any built-in windows tools or 3rd party.
Everything is fine then all of a sudden I notice one of my auxillary hard drives is no longer displayed under My Computer. So I open Computer Management and the disk is not displayed at the top, but it is shown on the bottom as "Disk 1, Unknown, 189.2 GB, Not Initialized" and to the right of it "189.2 GB Unallocated". If I get properties on the disk the same info is displayed. I try unplugging the USB cable, restarting, etc etc, nothing helps. Once in awhile the hard drive appears again and I can see the files/folders, but if I try to open a file Windows brings up an error message saying "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". If I right-click on the drive in Windows, select Properties, Tools tab, then run error checking I get the error message "Windows was unable to complete the disk check".
Sometimes when I try to open the drive in My Computer I get the error "Parameter is Incorrect" (and it doesn't open). I get the same error from the command prompt when trying to look in the drive. I've tried multiple operating systems and several computers to restore these drives. Another problem I was having is "Delayed Write Failure" when trying to copy files to or from the drive, even when they were (seemingly) working. I ran various command line utilities to check the disk and they all reported all kinds of errors. I also tried Fixmbr. Also, I don't know if it's related, but I keep getting these "Memory could not be read" or "Memory could not be written" errors. I got these errors immediately after installation a fresh copy of windows, after reformatting, and with 768 megs or RAM. I'm stumped on that as well. I also noticed the computer was averaging as high as 2500 pages/sec in the performance console when I had tons of memory free! (Does any of this add up?)
When I reboot the computer, windows offers to reformat the drive because it is not initialized. I tried to reformat 2 of the drives using about 6 different methods none would work - It would just hang up at 2% and never go on. Also, the computer runs about 100x slower with one of the bad hard drives powered up - Windows is probably jamming up trying to figure out what's going on, I assume.
Anyway, all of these drives were touched by the same computer which is now in the trash, since I figured it had to be at fault. The problems continued even after several clean re-installs of windows as well. I have all sorts of (current) virus protection, spyware, adware, all that.
I am totally stumped. I'm not an expert, but honestly I tried everything I could possibly find with no luck. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know! I'm most interested in preventing this from happening in the future, even more than saving the countless hours of work I lost.
This has turned into a serious problem that is literally ruining my life. If anyone is able to help me solve this I will do whatever I can to pay you back.
