Peripherals forum: HELP!!!!!!! Accessing Maxtor External Hard Drive.

I quickly registered because I needed to thank you. So, I hope you see this and...

Thank you so much for your suggestion and the step-by-step.

Thanks again!

>The symptoms were exactly the same as mine and the solution seems to have worked flawlessly. The little program (from http://www.cgsecurity.org) worked perfectly. Within SECONDS, my Maxtor HD was visible to windows explorer once again and ALL THE FILES seemed to be there. <

My dilemma began after trying to rebuild Win XP w/SP2 on another drive. NO other drives or periphs connected. When trying to access the OneTouch II 300 Gig drive, to restore my data, there were now 2 unformatted partitions instead of one large partition. Since I had over 100 Gig of unreplaceable data on the OneTouch, I was just a little excited.

After reading the responses from Maxtor, I felt encouraged to venture out. So with trepidation, I ran the "Test drive" program and it found the same 2 smaller partitions as Windows. I continued to do a "deeper" search of the drive, and it found my original 300 Gig partition. This took more than a few seconds, but I was now getting happy. It told me that the first partition table was "bad" and offered me the chance to copy the backup partion table to the 1st table. This took seconds, and when I rebooted, everything was restored. I can't say how much I admire and appreciate the author of "Test drive" from http://www.cgsecurity.org.

Thanks Oparvez.

step by step on how u did it
there is so manyt things to chooice

If both blue LEDs blink quickly in unison, that means that there is a hardware fault, and therefore no program can recover your data.

It's been suggested elsewhere in this thread that you can remove the IDE drive from the housing and mount it as an internal drive in your computer, and thus read it with any program, but this will void your warranty.

Thus, you choose between a chance at recovering your data vs. a warranty replacement with a new, blank drive.

- Rich

This is my first posting, so please forgive me if i leave anything out. I've had a Maxtor One Touch II 300 GB external hard drive for about 6 months now. I tried running a game off it tonight through my laptop (Compaq Presario 900 w/ Amd athlon processor on XP) only to have the whole computer lockup. Since it came back, the Maxtor has been no longer accessible. Windows will still acknowledge when it's plugged in through either my my USB 1.1 port or 2.0 notebook card. But when I try opening the hard drive, I get two alternating error messages. The first is ''The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable'' and the second is ''The parameter is incorrect.'' I also keep getting ''Data Execution Prevention'' notices from Windows.

I've read different forums on the similar topics and searched Maxtor but nothing seems to fit my problem. One solution I tried is to type chkdsk g:/f in a command prompt. The response I get is ''The type of the file system is NTFS.'' & ''Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted'' Also, Device Status says that ''The device is working properly.''

So I have a few questions. Are there any solutions to fix it? Is the data recoverable? Would it work again if I formated the drive? Or do I now have a $250 paper weight that has lost all my pictures, work documents, and music?

I would greatly appreciate any help.

I purchased this same drive, the 200 gig, external onetouch about 2 weeks ago. I took it home and backed up over 120 gigs of my lifetime of data onto it and was very excited to have it all backed up and off of my main hard disk.

Once i was done transfering all my data to it, i deleted everything from my main drive inside my computer, then i reformatted.

The next morning i notice the blinking light, the computer would not read the drive, NOTHING WORKED. I am pretty savy when it comes to computers and hardware but i called Maxtor anyway. Their technical staff are morons, i knew more than they did. They told me that there is nothing that can be done, and that they will send me a new drive. I accepted the free drive and hung up.

I then decided that i was going to take apart the external drive. My lifetimes work and data and everything was on it, and there was no way i was just going to forget about it and let it be gone forever. It was real simple to take the hard drive out of the casing. Just unscrew it all, then detatch all the screws holding the drive in the casing, and then detatch the cables inside. Take the jumper and set it to "slave", if you dont know how to do this, remove the jumper with tweezers and follow the chart on the drive to set it to read as slave.

Next is to take the casing off of your computer and attach the disk internally to the computer. What do you know? It loaded up and worked fine internally, so the problem is not with the drive, its with the External hardware inside the casing.

On a side note, once i put all the data back onto my internal hard drive, i took out the maxtor disk and reattached it to the external casing, plugged it back in and it worked fine so something is definatly wrong and maxtor needs to fix this or a lot of people are going to be screwed! Good luck to anyone with this problem, and if your data is really critical and you dont want it to be lost, who cares about voiding the warrentee. Just do it if it means saving your data! If maxtor takes your credit card info in exchange for you to send the "defective" drive back, wait until you get the drive back, then cancel the credit card. They have screwed enough people, do not let them screw you!

My Maxtor OneTouch 250 GB stopped working a couple of weeks ago. Similarly to the other stories here, it could be seen by XP but was detected as RAW. Chkdsk detected it (correctly) as FAT32 but crashed each and every time ("chkdsk has encountered an error and must close" or something like that. big fat data dump.)

FWIW I am pretty sure the last thing I did before it stopped working was a pretty large (8-9 GB) data transfer - not one file, but one folder with about 25 files.

I made my way through various forums and suggestions before I found this thread and have been making my way through the suggestions here. I started running testdisk and it moved verrrrrry sloooooowly but did log errors. It took 8 hours to get through less than one half of one percent of the drive and by then it was so hot I was worried about problems from that. It was making click-beep sounds that seemed to correspond to errors in the log which were coming fast and furious. I made the decision to stop testdisk, shut things down and let them cool off overnight to start again in the morning. Ha. That was the last time my computer (any computer) detected the drive. Now, I plug it in and it's just click-beep, click-beep inside the drive and no detection via USB at all.

Anything at this point that anyone can say to either help me or help the next person would be welcome. Has anyone ever heard click-beep and managed to recover?

My next move, I'm figuring, is to crack open the case and hook it up to a PC as an internal drive? It just isn't responding to anything at this point, including booting to Spin-Rite. Less drastic alternatives, advice and finger-crossing welcome

The fiddling with jumpers didn't work.

I found a page with .wav files of various HDD problems. It's not Maxtor, it's Hitachi, but I figured the sounds can't be that different. The page is here:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/cffe836ed7c12018862565b000530c74/4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument
or
http://tinyurl.com/34y47

The sound I'm hearing most closely resembles the slow spindle motor problem. So after a little more searching, I threw the drive in the freezer (well I didn't THROW it in, I wrapped it carefully and double-ziplocked it to keep the moisture out.

There are quite a few sites out there that talk about this trick. Here's one:
http://www.meetmyattorney.com/slink/mt-archives/000517.html

Here's one that shows how NOT to do it heheh:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1028112728

Now I just have to figure out which computer can accommodate both the frozen drive and an empty drive I picked up to copy data onto.

Whether it works for me or not I hope some of my links may be useful for someone.

By the way, I neglected to mention that the sound the HD makes when started up is just one click, as if it wants to read the drive but can't, and then I can feel the vibration from the HD spinning within. Just for GPs. Thought it might be useful info. Thanks.

I am using windows XP home edition with all current updates (SP2).

I too have this same issue on my xp sp2 machine. after service pack 2 was installed, neither explorer nor the installed maxtor software sees my maxtore one touch 250g firewire-connected drive--though it is listed on the device manager as working properly. Anyone find a hotfix, etc to bring it back to life?

I have read all sorts of things here. Its mind boogling. I wonder what Grif has to say here. Seems his input in missing. I'd love the read what he has to say.

Standeb

Hi grif.

You seem to make things so much clearer. You have given me an idea of what to do so that I will be prepared when something of the nature occurs.

It seems that one of the best ways to probably back up files lately is by using flash drives as opposed to Cds because in any event one would use up a lot of real estate when Cds begin to accumulate.

Do you think that flash drives are a good alternative taking into consideration that one 128 mb flash drive holds the equivalent of 88 floppys?

Meanwhile thanks for your reply on the above topic. It's always a learning experience reading your posts.

standeb.

Hi grif,

Just saw your reply. Thank you for the same.

Well, I have no alternative but to agree with you. I have used cds and floppies but I have used up some real estate for storage purposes. I have just begun to use flash drives although I have heard of them for some time but like you I am going to be cautious. I am informed that they have a life span of about 10 years.

You cracked me up about the spindles of cds for free.
Ha, ha, ha... really can't beat the price.

Thanks for the tips. They are well appreciated.

standeb.

I'm using a common WD 3.5" 160GB in a Q-Tech shell (5 partitions with the filesystem set to FAT32 due to W98 compability) and i haven't got any problem's since i have the WD in it... before i had a maxtor in the same shell, and that was problems... and more problems...

hence... actually 1 had 3 maxtors in the same shell within 6 months (they replaced the disks since the couldn't tell the problem either...) and i finally decided to get my money back for the maxtor due to being it faulty at the time of sale (we have this nice law here... and maxtor couldn't prove me wrong :D) and decided to buy a WD (that was 1 year ago..) and all the problems vanished...

seems like maxtor and usb hate eachother... or at least they don't understand usb!