Maxtor 1-TB external dead?
 

I've been using a Maxtor one TB external HD for backup etc. today the drive white light on the front, kept flashing, (should be on solid) after boot until in use. Computer won't see the drive, I can hear it spinning, but can't access any files. any Ideas. Gary

Can you see the drive in disk manager? If so, you have a damaged file table, and that can be it can be rebuilt using a command prompt MFT format command. If disk manager does not see the drive at all - chances are you will have to run a recovery software like R-TT tools. You will need a drive that is equal in size to yours to recover the data to. Here are the instructions on accessing disk management tools in windows XP:

How to use Disk Management
To start Disk Management:
1. Log on as administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
3. In the console tree, click Disk Management. The Disk Management window appears. Your disks and volumes appear in a graphical view and list view. To customize how you view your disks and volumes in the upper and lower panes of the window, point to Top or Bottom on the View menu, and then click the view that you want to use.
NOTE: Microsoft recommends that you create a full back up of your disk contents before you make any changes to your disks or volumes.


The recovery tool that has saved my bacon on multiple occasions is R-TT tools at http://www.r-tt.com well worth the small investment.

Ew. No problems up til this? I have the same drive, and that's worrying.

For what it's worth guys, I lost two FW drives (Lacie 250 and 500GB) in the past month. The guys at the drive recovery place quoted me anywhere from $1K to $4500 to recover--if at all.

All drives, all brands can fail. The only smart choice is to back up. I ordered 4 more drives right after this and am in the process of backing up every drive I have, and I really should make an extra copy of some of them and keep it at another location.

This drive thing is diabolical!

Is that one of the large maxtor 1TB drives that has two 500GB drives inside? On drives like that, the default configuration is often RAID0 which doubles your chances of losing data (if either drive fails, you lose everything). Some of them, WD my book is one i have used, allow you to configure it for a RAID1 which mirrors your data on each drive so even if a drive fails you keep all your data, just replace the bad drive.

From my experience, lacie drives do not usually have any such option (besides the higher end multi-drive raids), not to mention i've found them very unreliable... I've had multiple one, two, and 4 drive lacie external drives (bigger disk, bigger disk extreme, etc) fail on me. In fact more than half of the lacie drives we have at work have failed. Not to mention they are a real pain to repair.

Note: two drives ive recovered for people recently just needed to be turned on and off a few times, and mounted on the system eventually. I just copied the data off asap once this happened.

Thanks all, my "computer guy" is stopping by this week to see whats up with the drive, (I can't even get to "Disk Management"???...Gary

Do you have another machine that you could check the drive with. At my office, my partner has an Alienware machine that always loses the drives, but I can see them just fine with my HP. The drive just disappears from his machine for no reason whatsoever. Try to read it using a different computer.

I did try to see the drive on a two laptops, but no go, They see that their is new hardware and I can see the drive letter but can't open the drive. (The drive is still under warranty and I contacted tech support and I can send the drive back, but they won't save the files etc. which I may due since it was one of my two back up drives the same files are on another Maxtor one TB sitting next to the bad one. I guess if I can't see the drive I can't re-format???..Gary