Maxtor OneTouch 4 not being recognised

[gloriousglenn]

Hey guys,

 

Yet again I come crawling for help on this great forum!

 

I have a Maxtor OneTouch 4 External HD that I used to keep images of my laptops on. I went to try and blast an image onto one of the laptops today and I couldn't find the drive in My Computer.

 

It usually comes up with the normal "Found New Hardware"...."New hardware installed" and then the "What do you want Windows to do" dialogue box. This time nothing. Fair enough, but at least it'll be in My Computer showing as the F: (or whatever the next letter is!!). Nope, nothing there either!

 

If I plug it in and unplug it I get the two tone beeps letting me know that I've attached something...It's just not registering and showing anywhere.

 

Any ideas?

 

Cheers

Glenn

Edited June 24, 2009 by gloriousglenn

[LeMarchand]

Does it show in Computer Management/Disk Management? Last time I had something similar, Windows was trying to assign the drive a "used" letter. I just manually assigned it a free letter and it all worked fine after that.

[OutToLunch]

Check in drive management and see if it's showing up with no recognised partitions - may be an error in the partition table/information.

 

Alternatively, boot a Linux live CD distro like SystemRescueCD with the drive attached and see if it shows up/is readable - I've had quite a few drives disappear in Windows that were still readable/rescueable under the Linux NTFS implementation...

[gloriousglenn]

Ah! It's in there as:

 

Disk 1

Basic

232.88 GB (Unallocated)

Online

 

I can't seem to be able to do anything with it though!!

[OutToLunch]

Sounds like the partition table may have imploded. Give it a whirl with a Linux CD and you may be able to rescue your HD images onto another drive then reformat - or play around with restoring the second copy of the partition table if it's still good.

[gloriousglenn]

I ended up partitioning it, assigning it F: and then having to format it.

 

Luckily I have all of the data on the server, so no harm done!

 

Many thanks guys, yet again edugeek members to the rescue!!

[synaesthesia]

Keep an eye on it though. Maxtor drives are a bit too partial to "imploding" (Word of the Day I think!) like that, both internal units and those in external enclosures. A live boot from a Linux CD will often show the drive up as readable, but I see this is too late