Inherited a hard drive

Jonah

Spouting nonsense since the day I learned to talk
My mother's PC died recently and she went and bought a laptop to replace it. I've had the box and taken the hard drive out of it. I nipped into JC Computing and they tested the hard drive and told me it started spinning but locked up the machine when trying to boot but that didn't tell me if the hard drive is completely knackered or just software corruption?

Would a complete erase and reformat cure the drive?

Mum isn't bothered about getting any data off the hard drive as she only had a few documents on it. I was hoping I could use the hard drive in an enclosure with my Mac but, being a bit tight, I don't want to buy an enclosure in case the drive is knackered. I know you can buy really cheap enclosures but they are so ugly! And I don't really want to spend money twice.

Anyone got any ideas?
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
I suspect they meant they tried to boot a known working system with the HD in, but it failed to POST. I used to work there, and thats how I'd have done it. If this is the case then the drive is dead I'm afraid, you wont be able to get to it to perform a format.

Is it SATA or IDE?
 

Jonah

Spouting nonsense since the day I learned to talk
It's a SATA hard drive, Maxtor DiamondMax 21 250Gb.
 

Jonah

Spouting nonsense since the day I learned to talk
It's a Maxtor drive unfortunately. I have ended up buying an enclosure and the drive appeared on my Mac's desktop. The files seemed accessible but I have erased the drive and formatted it for my Mac (which was the aim of the exercise). It appears ok but the enclosure I bought is horrible so I'm sending it back and getting a better one.
 

RichardB

A few posts under my belt
Maxtor and Seagate are the same company now. At the top of that page it tells you what to do for Maxtor drives.

Seatools (on the site) should be able to tell you if there's a problem with the disk. Can't find a mac version unfortunately!
 
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