PC not reading Maxtor external drive

[cube_rat]

(fuzz, marshac, wab, BMJ or laurence - where are you )

My PC is not recognizing my external drive. I get a message stating "E drive is not formatted, would you like to format". This has happenned before and I simply can't remember how I got it to work. I detest doing IT stuff at home so I have a tendency to put root cause and solution way down the list of things to think about.

[wabmester]

XP is basically telling you that it can't find a valid filesystem on the drive. Generally, not a positve sign.

If the drive has multiple interfaces (e.g., USB and firewire), try the other interface just to eliminate the driver as a suspect.

If all else fails, try a data recovery tool. I've heard good things about a program called GetDataBack (free trial version available), but I haven't used it myself.

FWIW, the only drive failures I've had in the last several years have been Maxtors.

[Nords]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cube_rat My PC is not recognizing my external drive.

Can you access it through a command window to (1) recover the data you're looking for (2) run SpinRite?

[laurence]

Sorry to say I have to agree with Wab, as soon as I saw your subject line I said, "Uh oh". We have a big contract with Dell to provide all our workstations (they provide about 700 pc's a year in perpetuity to constantly refresh our pc's). All of a sudden our hard drive failures skyrocketed, they had switched from IBM to Maxtor.

Dumb question, along with what wab said, you've tried on a different PC?

[wabmester]

One other thing -- since it's recognizing the drive, but not the filesystem, you might be able to chkdsk/scandisk the drive. Chkdsk can repair the filesystem if the damage is relatively minor.

[cube_rat]

Thanks wab, Luarence & Nords. I'll try your suggestions

[AltaRed]

I was having some problems reading some folders on my Maxtor external HDD about one month ago and chkdsk solved them. Makes one wonder though about counting on Maxtor at all though....