Fried Maxtor 5.25 HD 120GB

In my experience, Maxtor drives are junk, all brands have had some duds, but those have been the worst. You might have luck swapping the board given this is likely an electrical failure.

My advice once you salvage the data would be to just go buy a new Seagage, they have the longest warranty of any of them.

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006 12:58:19 -0800, lederer Has Frothed:

It's physically impossible connect SATA cables to a PATA drive.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Dear Mr Plow

I was confused--the mac spec says that the slot that I pushed the drive into allows

# Hard drive bay 2

• 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200-rpm, 8MB cache * 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200-rpm, 16MB cache

So I guess that I put an ATA drive into an ATA slot. But the tower slot does not have the 4-power pins that the G4 tower has.

Is it possible to electronically destroy my Maxtor by trying to connect it to these sort of slots????

Again, thanks for the help,

Phil

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006 14:06:52 -0800, lederer Has Frothed:

Not sure unless the drive was forced into the slot and some of the pins made contact with the something.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Hi!

How did you get it hooked up? The connectors for (P)ATA as used in your G4 and SATA as used in the G5 are very, very different.

(I do have a dim memory of some adapters being sold that could convert PATA drives to SATA???)

You can try, and this might work. But if what's on the drive is *very* important--don't try this. Send the drive to a data recovery service. It will cost, but the odds are better that they can resolve the issue without causing further damage.

I have my doubts. Even a controller board from a drive of the same family

*and* capacity isn't always a close match to the original board on the "dead" drive. The defect maps and low level control/calibration information will differ. I don't think there's a chance in the world that a board from a lower capacity drive would ever work. It might even cause serious damage.

A board swap between two identical drive models is your best bet. This should work well enough to let you get the most important data back from the drive if the board is the only problem.

William

William

Again as noted above I goofed--the new Mac takes ATA drives also.

P

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006 20:05:55 -0800, lederer Has Frothed:

So you plugged the Maxtor ATA drive into the ATA connector on the new Mac? How would that damage the drive?

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Mr Plow

I must admit I am rather confused by the nomenclature.

The new machine has a SATA interface. I tried putting an ATA into it. I think you told me that it is possible that the electronics could have been damaged if some of the 40 pins on the ATA hit some "wrong" pins on the SATA interface in the computer (for example a power souce hit a controller pin on the drive)

Is that correct??

I guess a big downslide of the new Mac's cable less drive interface that it is easy to do this sort of damage by just trying to slide an inapproprate drive in. With cables you can clearly see the connectors are incompatible.

Thanks for your help. I will try to get a new Maxtor and try switching the electronics.

Phil

What he is saying is that SATA connectors are not physically compatible with parallel ATA connectors so it is impossible to connect the latter into the former. If you had a look at them you would see this fact and wouldn't even try to do so. After all, one of the the reasons they make the connectors different is so that reasonable people don't even try.

Can you spot the difference in the connectors?

SATA

PATA

Then again, all you had to do was read the Apple documentation

In both cases it is obvious that SATA connectors are used. Just because you couldn't (or didn't look) to see what the socket in the hard drive carrier looked like, you simply hoped the old ATA would simply plug in, and so you tried. Of course your attempts possibly not only caused the demise of your old hard drive, but may even have physically damaged the connectors in the hard drive bay. Before plugging a SATA drive into the bay it would be a good idea to physically inspect the connectors.

But he is saying they are hot pluggable drawer drives. Amazing what a bit of force can do at times.

In my defense, with the new Mac cable less slots you cannot see what the connectors look like--and if you try to push a ATA drive into the slot its does seem to "lock" in place. If you ever see the machine, look and see what I mean.

Thanks for your help,

Phil

Ross

I did look at this documentation. I was unaware that SATA and ATA drives were incompatible and had different connectors. Nothing in the Mac documentation shows a picture of what a SATA drive looks like--

Believe me, it is possible to push a ATA drive into the SATA slot and have it lock (seemingly). That is what I did.

(With all the interchageable names used for these drives (EIDE, ATA, etc...it is easy to overlook incompatibilty, especially since the old standard stood for so very long.)

Although this was stupid on my part, when one upgrades machines swapping drives is a common and efficient method to import data into a new machine. Somewhere in the documentation there should be a warning about the incompatablity of the drives and the damage that can easily be done.

I am lucky that the old drive is still on the market. I bet I will have success in swapping the electronics. I will post with my results.

Thanks for your posting and help.

Phil

Not only that but the power connectors have changed -- again!

Only on some SATA drives. I've seen SATA drives with the old 4 pin Molex connectors.

What's the big deal? Adapters are trivially easy to get.

Some have both. Some don't.

Yet another PITA.

Yeah, but they suck. The stuff we ship is for the industrial and military markets. Want to see how long that power connector holds on in a vibration filled environment? As it is, we have to use locking SATA data cables when we use the damn things. I haven't found a locking power cable yet, but, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard.

They don't suck any more than molex connectors in general. They're not likely to come loose in vibration prone environments as it takes a hell of a lot more force to separate the molex connector than it does to pull the SATA data and power connectors out of the drive. Put a locking cable tie around loose wire coming off the power supply and it won't come loose no matter how many monkeys you have around your shop pulling everything apart.