Installing Maxtor External Hard Drive

[hbman]

Hi,

My Maxtor External Drive became corrupted and I needed to re-format the drive.

Unfortunately, while Working in Windows XP I accidentally deleted the partition and the drive.

Now I can't get Windows XP to recognize the Maxtor Drive. I tried re-booting the PC and plugging in the Maxtor USB Cable, but this did not work. The Maxtor Drive was my H: Drive.

Can anyone help me get Windows to recognize my Maxtor Drive?

When I deleted the drive I was working in the "Computer Management" Screen.

I navigated to this screen through the following path: Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management.

Thanks in advance for the help.

hbman

[paullyboy]

Plug the unit into the computer and turn it on. Give it a minute. Then go to Computer Management and click on Disk Management. See if it shows up there. If it does, left click on it and you should find options for the basic setup. Try reassigning the drive letter first, then go to My Computer and see if it shows up there. If it does, do your formatting from there.

Best, Paul

Edited December 14, 2008 by paullyboy

[weEvil]

^ What he said. You broke it in Disk Management, and you should be able to fix it the same.

It should be listed as unallocated space.

Let us know if that works. Otherwise there might be another issue.

[hbman]

Thanks for your responses.

I tried what you said, but the drive doesn't show up in Disk Management.

I attached a screen shot of my Disk Management Screen.

All drives are accounted for other uses

C - Hard Drive

F - San Disk Reader

G - Printer

D - CD/R Drive

E - CD/RW Drive

How do I re-assign drive letters if I haven't created the drive yet?

Any help would be much appreciated.

hbman

WindowsXP1.doc

Edited December 14, 2008 by hbman

[Ponch]

My Maxtor External Drive became corrupted

...

the drive doesn't show up in Disk Management.

It might simply be more than corrupted; dead. Can you see a generic volume in the Hardware Management ?

Can you try to plug it on an other computer see if it shows any new hardware detected ?

[paullyboy]

Does it show up in Computer Management > Device Manager > Disk drives? If not, check your wiring. It should raise the 'new hardware found' balloon at some point. Has it done that?

I just looked at the screenshot. It shows the internal drive(disk 0) and 2 others( disk 1 and 2). Is the Maxtor not one of them? Are you sure?

Edited December 15, 2008 by paullyboy

[weEvil]

How do I re-assign drive letters if I haven't created the drive yet?

Please do not use word documents. It is very annoying.

Save your screenshot as a jpeg and upload that.

The drive does not appear to show up at all. You cannot give a drive letter to an invisible drive. Is the drive is visible in the BIOS? Unplug what you don't need to avoid confusion.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

... Can anyone help me get Windows to recognize my Maxtor Drive?...

Well, there are a few more things to know ...

{a} What is the size (GB) of the drive, (real size before partitioning?

{b} What was the file system (NTFS, FAT32, etc)? Do you still want same?

{c} Is the HDD in the enclosure SATA or PATA? Is it 3.5" or 2.5" HDD?

{d} What exactly do you mean by "My Maxtor External Drive became corrupted"?

{e} Do you have another computer? Partition/Format experiments on your one-and-only rig is unwise.

{f} What is your skill level? Can you add/remove ATA drives to a computer? Open/Close computer, deal with jumpers, cables, BIOS and maybe cracking the enclosure open? Its ok if you're not expert! Perhaps you have friends who claim to be experts that you could really put to the test?

... because what needs to be done is highly dependent on the answers. {d} When you say "corrupted", as opposed to operator error (e.g., you killed it but the drive is fine) you are suggesting this HDD is probably NOT ok to use. And, you cannot fix a bad disk drive by re-partitioning and formatting it. If the drive is physically corrupted (NOT ok to use) that should send you off on various detours looking for the problem source first:

* USB Host Hardware (port/card)

* USB Client Hardware Problem (enclosure)

* USB Host Driver/Registry (alphabet soup)

* Defective Hard Drive (overheated?)

But if we bypass those possibilities and continue on the path you started (the hardware is OK, "... help me get Windows to recognize my Maxtor ..."), then the question about disk size {a} and file system {b} matters a lot because if it was FAT32 as many are, you cannot Partition+Format in WinXP unless the HDD is not >32 GB, without multiple partitions. That is, unless you now want NTFS instead.

Having said all that (!), ASSUMING the drive is ok, here is what I would do, If the drive is the very common Maxtor_80GB_PATA with FAT32, I just pop the drive out of the enclosure (umm, depending on {c}), jumper it to work as ATA, boot to DOS7, FDISK, Format, repackage it, done. If NTFS, skip DOS and boot WinXP and do it there. BOTH ways are done in pure ATA because it is much faster and removes any USB problems from the procedure. However, this is not the easiest method! {f}. The easiest thing for you, since the data is apparently toast, is to buy another USB drive which are always on sale somewhere.

Final Disclaimer: I would not do any of this without first making sure all of the hardware is good. IMHO, it is not safe to stick defective drives into good machines {e}, it is best done on a spare computer in a controlled situation. I have seen some strange cases, for example an intermittent drive went invisible in the middle of a disk write and the VFAT continued writing onto the next good drive. This next good drive was no longer good.

EDIT: upon re-reading this thread I also do not see your OS level listed, WinXP SP?. This means yet another possibility ... if that HDD is bigger than the typical 120 GB, and you're using WinXP Gold (no service pack), well, the OS not seeing the drive would be what one might expect if the drive were on an ATA channel. It is still unclear to me how a USB adapter can mitigate this non-48-bit LBA issue, if it in fact does. Anyone?

Edited December 17, 2008 by CharlotteTheHarlot