External hard drive problem...
 

One of my external hard drives is having problems connecting, or staying connected. It's a Maxtor OneTouch II, 200gb drive.

A couple months ago the firewire port stopped working entirely. I couldn't get it to connect at all, so I've just been using with the USB 2.0 connection. Over the past couple weeks it will seem to lose the connection. When I connect the drive and turn it on, the autoplay comes up, then asks me what I want to to do. About 50% of the time I can open the contents and everything is fine, the other 50% it says it can't find it or it is no longer accessible.

I'm guessing the problem is either in the case itself (the USB connection has now dies as well) or in the ribbon cable connecting the IDE drive to the board inside the case.

Anyone have any recommendations?

I know I can just buy an external enclosure and swap that drive into it, but I have two of these, with an extra power supply for it, so I'd just as soon keep this case if I can.

Thanks!!

What kind of computer are you connecting to? I've been having this problem with my mac book pro. It's like it only recognizes it when it wants even if I don't have anything else plugged into the laptop.

I should have mentioned that. Two different systems, both running XP Pro.

Hi Wade - well, I'm not sure if I can help in a solution, but I've had very similar problems..maxtor one touch II drives (250 gig and another 300 gig)..started to have firewire problems, which I in part attributed to XP's not so great handling of firewire (I have about 2-3 other drives I am using on that box and have them daisy chained together).

I'm on SP2 which was supposed to include the firewire hotfix, but not much help from it.

I've done similar, which is revert to USB2.0 on the maxtor drives, which works for the most part and also seems to keep my other drives more stable too. Although yesterday, XP did not recognize the USBdrive..reboot, let it 'rediscover' the drive, reboot, and is working fine again, all data intact.

I'm not yet sure what to make of it either. At first I wondered whether the drive was failing, but I don't think so.

I also started to have a few bluescreens, which I thought may have been a problem w/ the firewire driver from my old pinnacle firewire card after XP SP2 upgrade, so I got a new firewire card just in case using a new card with up to date drivers helped w/ the firewire situation..it didn't, as far as I can tell. (thought it helped at first, but now not so sure).

The USB / firewire combo seems to work for the most part, even if it's a little bit of a pain. (and when I lose a drive, I power it down, repower then it comes back).

It can cause problems when I render overnight, but so far, I have not lost a drive in the middle of any edits (but I save often and backup regularaly, 1x/day min).

So, not much help on a solution, but thought I would share my similar experiences lately.. I wonder if there's something about the age of these drives that is failing or similar.

This one is just over a year old. After doing some google searches, it seems to be a fairly common occurence with the Maxtors. Ugh.

Thanks for the responses.

Maxtor just makes poop - from what I've read

If ANY drive gives you ANY problems, don't try to tweak through it.

Get rid of it and get a new one. They are too cheap now (I used to pay $2500 for 9Gb SCSI drives) to try to keep one running when it can roll over and die with all your precious data on them.

I use a Seagate USB2/Firewire drive for video editing and it's worked very well for me.

any solutions or what? what fails?

No solutions...it's just the circuitboard that has the connections on it. Maxtor tech support were absolutely no help.

My solution? I pulled the hard drive out and mounted it in my case. I'm also the proud new owner of a Western Digital :-)