As most of you know (due to my mood and constant whining) I lost my 120gig Hard Drive 2 weeks ago (pictures, videos, professional work, etc). We tried everything that we could think of to get the data back. Minnis helped me a lot through the whole process. I'd pretty much lost all hope, nothing we tried would recover my files. Well yesterday we started this program called Clone Maxx to try to copy all data from one HD to another HD. It ran extremely slow, over night for 11 hours and 35 minutes.

Well, when I got to work this morning I went straight to the PC, and the monitor said, "PC Inspector Clone Maxx Complete." (This is about the time that my pants almost got soiled). So I mounted a hard drive with win2k on it, put my new hard drive in as a slave, booted, and my files were there. hahaha, wtf. I am in such a good mood. Anyway, I'm documenting all the details again in case this happens to anyone else... it was pretty stressful, and you don't want to go through it...

Hard Drive:
-Maxtor 120 GB
-Slave (F:)
-NTFS

Timeline:
-I was syncing my iPod to my PC (all music stored on F: drive).
-iTunes stopped reading Hard Drive.
-I double clicked my F: drive under My Computer and the error "Incorrect Function" showed up.
-I tried accessing it through command line. Same error.
-I tried putting the HD in another PC as a slave. It wouldn't mount.
-We put it into a Linux box and tried to mount it. It still wouldn't mount.
-We ran Knoppix boot CD to try to get data, no luck.
-We ran chkdsk with varied results... sometimes it would show me a good list of files, other times it wouldn't.
-We ran Maxtor Powermax Diagnostic and received the error code: Y3JS57.
-Then we upgraded the tool and received this diagnostic code: de67a279, which means, "This drive is failing. If you do not have a recent backup of the data please do so now if possible. Write down the diagnostic code and contact Maxtor via the internet www.maxtor.com Online (RMA) is available 24 hours a day with valid powermax diagnostic code. Select warranty service from our homepage."
-I went to Maxtor.com and entered in my serial number and diagnostic code. It turned out that my drive was still under warranty so they sent me a replacement HD and gave me 30 days to send my old one back.
-We ran Maxtor Powermax again yesterday to try to move all recoverable data from one HD to the other. This did not work.
-We ran Ghost to try to move all files from one HD to the other. No luck.
-Minnis then downloaded Clone Maxx and we started running it. As I said before this program worked.
-I put the drive into a PC as a slave, booted up, it went through this huge list saying it was deleting all these entries... but I think that it was just re-organizing the drive, because my data is still there.

We think that a chip was weak and when the drive heated up, things just got worse. So while running clone max we had a pretty big fan pointed at the drive. If this did not work, our next step was to put the drive in a sealed static bag and in the freezer for 2 hours. Then remove it, plug it in, boot up and move files as fast as possible from one HD to the other. Then repeat this as many time as we would have needed to. Kraus and our LAN tech both gave me this idea.

Most people told me that my files were gone, which is funny... NEVER believe that. I actually believed it myself for the longest time. The funniest people to tell me this were the techs at college's and stuff, haha. So many people also told me to send it to a data recovery company, this costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Clone Maxx was free. Oh happy day!