Pity, but thanks.
The recovery software I ran found 3 partitions on my system - two of something like 17GB, and the third of 86GB. The smaller ones contained some files, but I didn't recognize them - they are probably from a 40GB boot-drive I bought second-hand and even repartitioned later. No files were found on the third one - I suspect that's the 80GB Maxtor, only it's size was reported wrong.
Strangely, but, in my view, that Maxtor could run a significant more time to come!
It had about 3000 power-on days but with "low-load", since I process many videos on relatively slow machines, and the drive spins for a long time doing little data access. However, the data I burned on about 2500 DVDs for others and myself was once stored on the drive, so at least about 10 TB of data was written and read from it (not counting some more in temporary files along the way), and it also hosted virtual-ram file in Windows for at least 11 years!
Since it was the only drive, it often had to move/copy data from one area to another too, quickly moving the heads back and forward for lengths of time. Bad sectors started appearing this summer, at the end of a system partition where windows "hibernate" file was. Health decreased quickly from 96 to about 50-60, stabilizing at 16%. The drive first marked 4-5 sectors as "bad" after one power-failure several years ago (those might have not been "bad" at all, though, as it lost power during intensive write operations), but that increased to 17, than 22, 300 and finally 622 the 4 times it accessed the "hibernate" file recently (I noticed the access to it became unusually slow). It was a relatively small damaged area, but as a quick and safe fix I still "moved" the entire system partition by about 17GB - to the "healthiest" part of the surface, decreasing second partition size. Performance rose from 97-98 to 99 and even 100% shortly after, as RunOutCancel parameter improved. The drive had some areas of slower access, an occasional darker-green block or two on surface-scan, especially near the end of the partitions. The fault was mine - I rarely did backups, so the actively used area became rather small and was accessed often. Spin-up time was slowly increasing, but that SMART parameter was still good (green), there were some yellow exclamation marks on RunOutCancel (values were around 20-30-40), and a few other parameters tracking data access errors. The drive was hot from day one - always at least around 43 and reaching as far as 52 degrees in the summer! I think it's maximum temperature ever recorded was 56.
A few SMART parameters behaved "strangely". Power-on time, power-on count, and the oldest to exhibit the same kind of "weirdness" was spin-up time. Spin up time had a "saw"-like value pattern - increasing for days, than falling to a lower level, then increasing steadily again. Power-on time was often resetting to a value of about 10-15 days, then counted normally until the next sudden reset. Power-on count was the most interesting, as it kept resetting to lower values too, but with each boot of the system it would "add" a few hundred "starts" to the value!
I must admit, as much as I wanted my data back (not too much was there, luckily, as I backed up the drive at the end of August), even more I wanted to use it until it's very end!
Once again, thanks for a wonderful piece of software!
