Quantum & Maxtor Hard Drive Data Recovery

Quantum made popular desktop drives such as the Fireball and Bigfoot before selling its hard drive business to Maxtor in 2001. Maxtor was then acquired by Seagate in 2006, and the Maxtor name was later used on Seagate-made external drives. Today Quantum specialises in tape libraries, backup appliances and file storage.

We recover data from old Quantum and Maxtor hard drives and from Quantum tape and backup systems.

Products We Recover

Range / family	Example models & notes
Quantum hard drives	Fireball (ST, CR, lct, EX, AS, Plus), Bigfoot, and Atlas SCSI drives.
Maxtor hard drives	DiamondMax 9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23; MaXLine; and Maxtor OneTouch, OneTouch 4 and Maxtor M3 external drives.
Quantum tape	LTO-1 to LTO-9 cartridges from Scalar i3, i6 and i6000 libraries, DLT and SDLT.
Quantum backup & storage	DXi deduplication appliances and StorNext file systems.

Common Faults

• Seized spindle motors on drives that have been stored for years
• Head crashes and scratched platters
• Maxtor DiamondMax firmware faults
• Snapped, creased or mis-wound tapes and unreadable LTO cartridges
• Overwritten or reformatted backup tapes

Before you send your device – five things to avoid

• Switch the device off and leave it off – every power cycle can make physical damage worse
• Do not run CHKDSK, Disk First Aid, fsck or recovery software on a drive that clicks, beeps or is slow
• Do not open the drive or swap the circuit board – modern boards hold drive-specific adaptive data
• Do not reinstall the operating system or initialise the disk when prompted
• Keep liquid-damaged devices unpowered and bring them in as quickly as possible