I have this 250GB external Maxtor HD with its own enclosure. This thing had issues with it being detected. Sometimes it gets detected, sometimes it doesn’t.

Problem Now is:

1) I can get it to detect the HD in the quicklaunch area (curved green arrow indicating detection of external HD). When I double click on it, it would show the name and make of the HD. And that I can stop the device so as to safely unplug it.

2) I can’t view the contents of the HD. The HD is not showing up in my explorer as an extra drive. It’s not showing up at all.

Has anyone had this problem before?

S….... O ....... S…....

How are you connecting? USB2? Firewire?

If USB2, are you using a USB2 certified cable?

Have you tried the drive on other computers to rule out the possibility of a bad enclosure? It’s possible that the there’s a problem with the circuit board of the enclosure and it’s not functioning correctly. This has happened to me before. It may also be related to the device not getting enough power…perhaps an AC adapter problem?

Can other devices attach on the same port? If not, then it may be a problem with your computer.

i have a similar problem with my ipod when i tried to use it as an external HD. If you have service pack 2, you can actually find the hard drive under control panel, portable media device. that’s how i found mine. afterwards it started to show on my computer. Iono if this helps or not…..I dont know about sp1 though….. :(

I’m gonna look into this. I’m gonna put the HD into another enclosure.
We’ll see if this is the culprit.

I switched the HD to another enclosure and it’s still a no go. The enclosure is from a different manufacturer—low quality one.

I’m using Windows XP.

(1) Again it would make that “boing” noise indicating that it’s detected and ready to go and there’s a green arrow on the quick launch area indicating this. But when I go to windows explorer, I don’t see an external drive indicated there.

(2) Partition Magic 8 says that the disk is unallocated. This worries me somewhat.

(3) QUESTION: I’m thinking about popping the HD in the computer and perhaps it might get detected that way? Do you recommend any tools I can use to deal with this problem?

—Can it be a “master boot disk record” issue? i.e. it’s missing a master boot disk record?

SOS

Did the drive show up in the Disk Management area of the Computer Management utility?

When I open up the Computer Management panel and click on Disk Management, I see that the box on the right is blank and there’s an an error on the bottom of the right panel saying “Unable to connect to Logical Disk Manager service”

:cry:

What does that mean? Is there hope still?

So, you’re not seeing something like this?

If not, you have a problem with your Windows installation…and that may be the reason for your problems. Make sure the Logical Disk Manager service is started and running. You can check it in the Administrative Tools -> Services.

Since my computer can also detect my other external HD, La Cie 250GB, I believe the problem is the external HD itself. It somehow must have lost it’s “master boot record” equivalent. I remember seeing an error similar to this. What do you think?

I’m gonna hold off fixing this for the next couple of days and wait for the weekend to deal with it. If I take it to a repairs shop, what exactly would they do to recover my data? And can I do this at home?

:?:

Have you tried removing the hd from its enclosure and connecting it directly to a motherboard?  If its servos can still work, try using SpinRite to recover your data.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

What do you mean by servos?
If the operating system already sees it as an unallocated drive, how would plugging it in directly to the computer change this?

But yes, I think it’s a good thing to try, though.
Thanks,

is there a spinrite substitute? Preferrably one that’s free?

I quickly realize that when it comes to backing up data, you should spend to purchase quality products. So immediately after this incident, I went on to eBay and picked up another La Cie HD.

I tried this recovery tool called O & O Recovery Tool.
It took 6+ hours to recover everything, BUT…

It recovered the files in its own file structure. So basically, all the files are there, but it’s been rearranged according the the recovery tool program.

Does anyone know of a data recovery program that allows me to recover my files and the folder names that the files were in, i.e. the file structure is intact??
  :?:

Execsoft’s Undelete 5.0 should do what you’re asking for…

I used it to recover most of my files from an external drive and it was able to recover about 80% of my files. In best case scenarios, it will restore everything to the original locations (or a location you specify). In worst case scenarios, it will restore files only and stick them in an temp folder. OF course, it’s better than nothing…

I’ve never had success with any of these undeletion softwares till date. Recently I formatted the wrong harddrive and lost like 30 gb of data. Immediately I got this software named Easy Recovery Pro and boy was it an absolute piece of trash. The bulk of the files I lost were movies and even the files which it showed to be in good condition would either not play at all or just freeze if I took the slider to some other point in the movie. I think even program files, etc didn’t function. I’ve had a similar experience in the past too (again where I formatted the drive by mistake :oops:) with another software I used at the time.