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Maxtor firmware(the microcode) corruption makes the drive (and data on it) inaccessible. Maxtor drives with firmware corruption will often have some of the following symptoms:

* Recognised incorrectly in the BIOS, the computer will then often hang
* Recognised as 0 bytes in size
* not be recognised at all in the BIOS
* Run slowly make a regular ticking noise at start up

Maxtor G-List corruption
(all SLIMLINE Maxtor hard disks (541DX family, Fireball 3 family, DiamondMax Plus 8 family))

G-List is a growing table of defects that the drive uses to avoid bad sectors that have developed since its factory formatting, the drive marks a sector as bad and then allocates a reserve sector from a special area for the drive to use so that the LBA of the drive does not change.

At startup, the Maxtor hard disk loads the service data from its firmware zone into RAM and calculates the checksums of certain critical modules before allowing the drive to report on readiness. One of these modules is the G-List. When one of these drives fail with a G-List fault it will:

* not report readiness
* will be recognised by the PC BIOS by its factory alias
* refuse to allow access to user data

Despite G-List inaccessibility, successful recovery of the drive and the data on it is often possible as a complete copy of the defects stored within the G-List is also located in the Pivot Defects table, the same drive table that is actually used by the drive when loading the defects and translating the Logical Block Addressing (LBA) of the drive at start-up.

The only reason that the drive will not start with a corrupt G-List is that it does not have the ability to repair the G-List itself and thus has nowhere to store any new defects that may develop during use. Because of this unique feature of the Maxtor hard disk it is almost always possible to perform a near 100% recovery of the data.

Maxtor firmware update download

Maxtor Shared Storage II Firmware Update v3.1.28

Firmware Update for STM31000334AS, STM3640323AS, STM3320614AS, STM3160813AS
Download MX1B Firmware Update Utility

STM3500320AS Firmware update download:
STM3750330AS Firmware update download:
STM31000340AS Firmware update download:

DiamondMax 23 Firmware Update download here

The following specific models are included:
STM3160318AS
STM3250318AS
STM3320418AS
STM3500418AS
STM3750528AS
STM31000528AS
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