[Solved] Maxtor external hard drive problems

Hi there,

1. For some time I've been using a maxtor external hard drive (previously with xp and now with windows 7)
2. It was working well, until the other day. Now the drive is listed within file manager (f) but I cannot gain access?
3. The only changes which have occured recently was the purchase of a (USB) memory card reader for use with a digital camera.

-Is there any way of accessing my hard drive?
-I have already got hold of a program which searches for and updates drivers, but that hasn't worked.
-I was also looking into obtaining some sort of recovery software, and this seemed to recognise the drive type and access the drive and display the contents, but It seems that I would loose all the file names (eg. thousands of mp3 tunes etc), not to mention the cost of the recovery software.
-Any further options I could take?

Was this an internal multicard card reader? Anyhow, be sure your card reader didn't accidently get assigned the same letter as your hard drive. When this happens, your hard drive will get assigned a new drive letter. This can mess up programs that expect data to be on that drive letter.

Does it work when you disconnect the card reader?

Does the drive function properly when the card reader isn't connected to the computer? That is can you actually transfer files to/from the drive?

If it doesn't work, you can try drive cleanup. Run it with the -T option first to see what changes it will make. Be sure that your external drive and card reader are disconnected from the computer when you run it. If you don't feel comfortable using it, I understand. I have used this in the past and it worked for me. Just so you know, if you do run this, any usb device that was previously plugged in will act like it's the first time being used on the computer. That is, you will see the "new hardware found" dialog when you plug your drive or any other deivce that wasn't connected at the time you ran the program.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetool [...] ivecleanup

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey