external HDD trouble ...

[Avtrician]

The drive might be having a conflict with another drive of the same letter ie E:

Using your computer admin tools should allow a reassigning of the drive letter.

[Squawk7777]

I recently bought an external enclosure so I could reactive an old IDE hard drive. It connects to the computer via USB 2.0. The enclose also has its own power supply.

When I initially connected the external HDD to my laptop all seem ok at first: New device detected, being installed, pop-up window asking me what I would like to do with the new drive. When I accessed the HDD under explorer I noticed that some folders could not be accessed and I got a "unknown I/O error". :uhoh:

I rebooted the laptop and when I connected the external HDD, no pop window appears and the drive does not show under explorer. When I open up device manager, I see the drive listed and as working properly :confused: :{

Any idea what is going on, or how I can access my HDD with my laptop? A second computer is not an option for a couple of days :ugh:

7 7 7 7

Edit: Am using Windows Vista (still :ouch: )

[mixture]

Which OS are you running and how big is the drive ?

Windows XP (prior to a certain update being applied) were unable to recognise drives over a certain size. This may be the case with you.

Is the drive "known good", or was it previously given "early retirement" for good reason ?

[Squawk7777]

Last time I ran the drive (20GB), it worked fine. Am using Vista ...

[Mike-Bracknell]

Do you see the drive in the BIOS?

Do you see the drive in Disk Management (right-click Computer, choose 'Manage').

[Keef]

I had this when I put a drive into a caddy that was powered via the USB lead. Solved it by using one with an external power supply.

[Squawk7777]

Thanks for your advice, Mike. When I run Computer Management under "Storage -> Disk Management" I get a window telling me that I "must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it". The external USB disk is shown as Disk 3.

It asks me which partition style I want to use:

* MBR (Master Boot Record) (selected) or
* GPT (GUID Partition Table)

There's also a note telling me that the GPT partition style is not recognized by all previous version etc.

I cancelled it fearing that my HDD would get formatted and my precious data lost.

Can someone shed some light into this? I have no idea what the above means or what it will do to my data of my external HDD.

More info: The hard drive is an old Maxtor, model MAXTOR 92041U4 20GB IDE 3.5, the external enclose is made by Rosewill (link).

Edit: Can't get the inserted link to work :\ ...

[le Pingouin]

Squawk, wise to stop when you did. The drive appears to be found but the system doesn't see a file system. A few thoughts come to mind:

Simple things first - try a different USB cable & use a different USB socket. Try it on another computer.

More complicated things - the enclosure could have a problem or the drive could have a problem. Open the enclosure & make sure the data cable is properly seated. Try the drive again. Try another drive in the enclosure.

If you can, try the drive in another enclosure or plugged directly into a computer.

[JamesT73J]

Seconding the caddy issues - I've seen that cause this problem. The hard way to validate this is to remove the drive and get it into a USB caddy.

Alternatively, the partition table may be corrupted; this usually means the data is okay but your OS cannot read it. The data is usually recoverable but you'll need software to do this.

[Ancient Observer]

PC is Win 7, all seems fine.

Drive is an external Maxtor, usb 2 connector. which worked fine with my old pc and XP SP 3.
The Maxtor "one touch" software which came with the drive does not work with Win 7 and is no longer supported by Seagate.
So I decided to use the drive for back up letting Win 7 do the back up.

It did the first back up fine. I could go to "computer" and see what was on the drive.

No more.

Under Computer management, device manager, Maxtor, properties, policies, I have enabled "quick removal".
One day the Win 7 back up seemed to be taking forever, and not discernably doing anything, so I stopped it, and removed the usb.

Now, in "computer" it says "the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable" no matter which usb I plug it in to.
Under "computer management" the "device manager" bit tells me that it sees the drive. it tells me that it is working fine. The Storage, disk management part tells me that the disk is "Healthy" - whatever that means. .....but under properties in storage/disk management, it tells me that it has Zero disk space. Zero used, zero free, and zero total.

Er, any ideas what to do, or is it time to bin the drive? I would like to see what is on it, if possible, before I bin it. Any thoughts?
thanks
AO

[Pontius Navigator]

Oddly enough I just solved a similar problem today using tips from a google search.

The drive had worked, now it didn't. The same issue applied to some other external drives.

The solution, as touched on above was to us My Computer, then Manage, Storage, Disk Management, this listed all the drives including the external drive but it had no letter. A click (right I think) and then assigned a letter and it worked.

[Ancient Observer]

Pontius,
glad that worked for you. It just doesn't work for me.

I've now tried the Maxtor with an XP SP3 pc, and altho' the "Maxtor manager" tests it and says it is fine, it cannot be used. if I ask Maxtor to test it, it says it is fine. If I ask either my pc or Maxtor to actually read what is on it, they both say it is corrupt. I've tried other googled ideas, but can't find a solution.
It could be bin time, which is a shame as I think there are some piccies on there from an earlier pc that MS7 has not, apparently, transferred over to my new pc.........

[le Pingouin]

AO, you could give this a go to see what it finds: TestDisk - CGSecurity (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk)

[Pontius Navigator]

AO,

Have you tried the process after a clean boot?

I have 3 different external drives and for some reason my computer declined to read them. I have now done that process on each and it worked each time. Do try once more.

There are one or two more things I need to do which is to ensure that the different drives could be read together, ie different drive letters. I have a card reader that uses 4 or 5 drive letters and need to ensure that it remains compatible.

I don't know why this happened but as I am not alone one begins to suspect the dreaded security updates.

[Ancient Observer]

Thanks for the ideas. I tried the clean boot, after which the Maxtor manager stopped seeing the drive. I then tried testdisk, and the m/s site recc.s for testing a disk. Couldn't make test disk work,and the m/s stuff didn't help.

I've decided to go nuclear. Drive is now being formatted. At least it'll tell me whether or not I need a new drive.As it was back up no1, I guess I ought to fork out for a new external drive. (Back up no 2 still works).

thanks for the ideas.