Can my Ex-HD still be salvaged...?

[KosmoLeo]

I have a Maxtor 260Gb external hard drive, usb 2.0. A couple years ago I had gotten terrible virus on it, one of these things where when trying to play a downloaded video file, I got a message in Windows Media Player saying such and such a codec must be downloaded to play this file. So, like a naive fool I clicked the link in the message thereby downloading the virus to the external hard drive. The obvious result was that in no time at all the files were corrupted and destroyed, and the file system itself was destroyed, causing Windows (XP at that time) to see the disc as 260Gb of unallocated space. Well I was able to use Get Data Back to recover some of the files but most were lost. So I completely reformatted the drive in NTFS and started over with it. It worked for a short while and than one day it was just 260Gb of unallocated space again, no new virus, it just happened again! I was able to recover the files, but they were so corrupt as to be unusable. so this time around I reformatted again in NTFS and used a prgoram to rewrite the MBR and the result was the same, it worked for a while, than, poof, unallocated! The last thing I have tried is using a low level format program to low level format the drive in all 1's and 0's, twice, first time starting with 1's, second time starting with 0's. And the result is the same, unallocated once again. Can anyone please offer some helpful advice as to why this could still be continuing to happen after all these efforts? Is there anything else I can do to try and make this drive work correctly again? I have always been satisfied with Maxtor hard drives before and this one worked very well before all this got started. Any knowlegable help would be most appreciated.

[djr33]

I don't have too much useful advice, but here are a couple basic ideas:
1. Is there any chance the virus is still acting on your computer? If so, it might be messing up the hard drive again.
2. Is the drive just a drive or is there some bit of software (firmware) operating on the device? Perhaps that is actually corrupted.
3. Possibly something mechanical is wrong with the drive, causing it to be unreliable. The virus might have overloaded it.

However, my advice would be to reformat it a few times, using various systems. Try a Mac, for example, and format it to a non-windows format. Fill it up with data (or just hope the full erase works), and then reformat again to whatever you want as the final version.

I'm not sure what's wrong or if that will help.

I'm not sure how it keeps coming back once you reformat, but if that doesn't work I don't think there is much you can do.

[KosmoLeo]

Can't be the virus still, because I still have the same problem on new laptop with Vista now. After the zero wipe and reformat I also ran a program to check the entire drive for bad sectors, sector by sector, which took about two weeks, and it finished with no bad sectors found. It's a 260Gb hard drive in an external enclosure, so I have definitely considered the possibility that the firmware was corrupted, and I looked around on Seagates' website for firmware downloads, no success. Anybody know where I might be able to download firmware for this drive? I know the virus may have overloaded it and caused it to be mechanically unreliable and that it will be screwed if that's the case, but I'm still going to work on it a bit more before accepting that conclusion.