It was usually because of stiction. The lubricant in the actuator bearing drying up.
Whatever the cause, you’re correct. The ‘freezer trick’ went out with IDE. DON’T DO IT with newer drives.
Thanks.
I’m going to try and get hold of the original power lead before I attempt dismantling the drive. The drive’s nearly a couple of decades old and huge by today’s standards, so it may have different power needs than more modern external drives, which have been working with the universal power lead I have.
I’ve got a couple of old laptops that don’t turn on any more that I want to excavate, so the SATA adapter will be useful for those at least.
I had an older adapter for this sort of thing - it had IDE and mini laptop and SATA plugs to USB. I tried it with a drive in Windows 11 and it went bananas. I had to reboot.
I read over the disassembly article, and note a couple of things:
I have not used an IDE/PATA connection in a long, long time. From the pictures shown in the article, it does not appear to be of the older style IDE/PATA drives, so a modern external SATA adapter should work fine.
This “drive” is really 2 drives in a RAID-1 configuration. On a basic level, that means that they mirror each other in order to protect your data. So it is very possible that the RAID card in there is the problem, and that extracting either one of the drives will get you your data back.
The article also mentions what a flaming pain in the ass it is to get this thing apart. If you’ve not done this before, I encourage you to watch some videos, read the article, and maybe use a little (not a lot) of heat to soften some of the 2-sided metal tape they used to assemble this thing. It’s not going to be pretty, but in the end you want to get the 3.5 inch disks out of there and into an enclosure/external adapter so you can test them yourself. The article also mentions the general unreliability of Maxtor drives of this vintage.
Good luck!
If you’re talking RAID, that adds another risk layer in this situation.
Even for so-called RAID-1 “mirroring”, it’s possible the controller lays the data out in a proprietary format. You might be able to separate the drives, hook one or the other to a proper vintage ordinary non-RAID IDE controller and have two shots at success. Or not.
Good luck. Seriously, not snarkily.