Maxtor One Touch II not accessible?

[fallen76]

Hello all--my first post in the forums
Anyway, I have a Maxtor One Touch II 200GB USB external hard drive as a backup. I had problems with my system, so I reloaded everything from scratch on my main HDD. I made an
attempt to get my data from my Maxtor, but received an error:

"Location is not available. X E:\ is not accessible. Incorrect function."

Under (My) Computer, the drive can be seen, but just as "Local Disk (E:)", without showing its properties.

When I try to access it, the light on the unit flashes as if it is trying to get the data, and I get the above mentioned error.

Does anyone have this problem under their belt?I don't have any experience in data recovery software, or data recovery in general. I was actually considering taking it to the Geek Squad but I'm not sure how badly I will be charged for finding out if the drive is bad now, as well as any data recovery (they have 3 categories of data recovery pricing). I'm just looking for any advice anyone can give. Thank you.

[willcomp]

Look in Disk Management and see what the properties are. Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management

Is SP2 installed? If not, install it with drive disconnected.

Have you tried removing and replugging USB connector?

If necessary, you can remove hard disk from enclosure and connect it internally bypassing USB connection.

[fallen76]

Look in Disk Management and see what the properties are. Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management

Is SP2 installed? If not, install it with drive disconnected.

Have you tried removing and replugging USB connector?

If necessary, you can remove hard disk from enclosure and connect it internally bypassing USB connection.

I just checked under Disk Mgmt, and it shows it as Basic, Online, and Healthy (Primary Partition), but it's showing it as 189.92 GB RAW. I'm not sure if the "RAW" means all my data is gone? I really hope not--I had a lot of stuff on there.

I'm just not sure if the drive is in a failing state or if this is from a virus or malware. I'm not sure if I should take it to the Geek Squad and have them diagnose the problem, or just send it away for data recovery services.

Any advice?

[willcomp]

If you are confortable with working inside your PC, connect drive to one of the internal IDE or SATA connectors and see if it is properly recognized.

You can also try connecting to another PC and see it it operates properly.

Once again, do you have SP2 installed?

[fallen76]

I originally had the drive on an XP Pro machine. I upgraded to Vista a few months before ago. I mainly used the drive on the Vista machine, but also accessed it through my wireless LAN to XP computers. All of them have the latest updates, including XP's SP2.

[LeslieWolslegel]

I have a similar problem. My light is flashing but my pc doesn't recognize the device. What does SP2 have to do with it?

[fallen76]

I have a similar problem. My light is flashing but my pc doesn't recognize the device. What does SP2 have to do with it?

Someone asked if I had SP2 installed, I assume to see if I had the required drivers. Drivers came with the unit, though, as unnecessary as they were, because Windows auto-installed them I believe. By now, I'm not sure if my data is still there, but I might send it to the manufacturer's data recovery department, even though it is expensive, but my data was pretty important to me.

[fallen76]

I'm thinking about sending the drive to the manufacturer to see if they can get anything from it. I might attempt to disassemble the enclosure on the external drive and connect it via SATA/IDE internally.

[samgoober]

We had a customer bring in a PC infected with a rootkit, MBR virus, and a myriad of malware. After cleaning the drive, we found the data was totally inaccessible. Windows XP and Windows 7 both reported the drive type as RAW (drive was originally NTFS-Windows XP Home).

Using a disk editor I looked at Sector 0 of the drive, as well as the first sector of the former NTFS partition. Both were gibberish. I tried fixmbr, fixboot, mbrfix, all the normal Windows tools. None of these worked. I tried several tools that claimed to be able to recover problems like this. None of them worked (including the one that ended up working).

In retrospect, probably any of the packaged (non-Windows) tools I tried (Partition Magic, Partition Tools, and other similar programs) would probably have worked had I tried this. All of these tools have a "partition recovery" feature. Running these natively wouldn't work - they all saw the RAW partition as a "real" partition. I presume for all they knew, the RAW partition was as it was supposed to be. These tools and wizards were built to recover deleted partitions and put them back like they were before they were deleted.

I was ready to format the drive and reinstall Windows, when I had a thought - what if I actually deleted the RAW partition? At this point, I had nothing to lose - I was gonna format it anyhow right? So I deleted the RAW partition. Afterward, I told the tool I was using (which happened to be Partition Tool free edition (http://partition-tool.com/personal.htm), but as I mentioned, most-likely Partition Manager or other similar tools would have done the same thing), to recover the deleted partition. I kind of expected it to put it back as a RAW partition. To my surprise (and utter delight) it recovered the partition as NTFS! All the user's data and programs were there, intact and working (which was good because he has some archaic programs on there that I don't think can be obtained anymore.)

I wouldn't probably recommend this as a first choice unless you know you have a good copy of your data. It worked for me when nothing else would. And I was ready to format/reinstall, so there was nothing to lose at this point.

Hope this helps someone.
Sam
CSI Computer Service
Logan IA
samatcsilogandotcom