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Help! How to Fix I/O Error with Maxtor One Touch External Hard Drive
Can someone please help me? I've got a 250 gb. Maxtor One Touch External Harddrive (firewire and USB2) purchased and installed in February, 2005. Currently, I have it connected to my XPS Gen 3 tower with the USB 2 cable. About a month ago, I experienced an I/O error with this device. The computer would no longer recognize the drive. I tried everything--uninstalling, reinstalling, switched USB ports, changing it to the Firewire port, etc. and I still got the error. Finally, I gave up, reformatted the drive and started over. My problem is that I have 200 gb. of music loaded on this drive. It takes A VERY LONG TIME to load all of this music and I really don't want to go through this again. Is my drive bad? Or is there a way to get these files off this hard drive. Any advice would be most appreciated. My system specs are:
Dimension XPS Gen 3
Pentium 4--3.4 Ghz
1 gb RAM
DVD-Rom
DVD+RW
2 internal hard drives--250 gb and 160 gb
2 external hard drives--250 gb each (only this one causes problems!)
plus the usual perpherials (printer, scanner, etc.)
I would most appreciate any advice to save the files on this hard drive!
fireberd
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July 1st, 2005 09:00
From your description and the fact you have two USB drives and the other one doesn't have a problem it pretty well says it's the drive, not the PC.
Whether it's the case and connection/cable or whether it's the physical drive??? Drives to fail, they do lose format, etc. That's why we back up data.
ejn63
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July 1st, 2005 10:00
If you don't, contact a data recovery service and prepare for a big bill.
samdogmom
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July 1st, 2005 11:00
I own all of the CDs. I didn't back up the drive because I'd have to buy another hard drive for 200 gbs of music. Oh well!...
Could you clarify one thing though, you're saying the drive failed but my computer says it's healthy when I look at it in the device manager. It's just RAW now--the NTFS formatting has disappeared. My computer is telling me I need to format the disk--which I don't want to do because then I'll really lose all of these files. So if the computer can now see the disk as unformatted is it still bad? Or, is there any way to recover the files?
When I talk to Maxtor, do I ask for a replacement hard drive? I bought this One Touch from Dell on Jan. 26, 2005 and they're telling me they're not responsible for replacing the drive--they're just the middleman.
samdogmom
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July 1st, 2005 12:00
fireberd
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July 1st, 2005 16:00
samdogmom
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July 2nd, 2005 14:00
Thanks for all of your help! I have learned a lot from your postings on this forum. I did want to let you know that since I was facing more than 100 hours of work re-ripping all of my music CDs to my computer I was relentless in trying to find a solution to my problem.
I did talk to Maxtor and they agreed that the hard drive is bad. They're sending me a replacement. (I wish I could pick a different brand--but my other Maxtor is older and has been just fine--so I'm trying to be optimistic.) Anyway Maxtor tech support recommended formatting backup hard drives with no primary partition--only an extended partition. By doing this Windows XP doesn't try to look for an operating system, thus reducing the number of I/O tasks on the hard drive. Also he told me there are more problems with the drive when it's hooked up to the computer via the USB 2 jack. Apparently, Windows does something with USB perpherials more frequently than those on Firewire jacks. So by using Firewire there's less of a chance of getting a hang during an I/O operation and causing the hard drive to fail. Go figure. I sort of believe this because my older Maxtor is hooked up via Firewire and the newer problematic one was connected via USB 2 (it helped me know which was which in my device manager). I had two failures of the USB2 drive in the past two months. The first time, I figured it was my fault so I reformatted the drive and reloaded all of my music. Since this happened again less than a month after I got everything reloaded, I was more convinced that the problem was in the drive.
Anyway to make a long story short there is a way to get files off a drive that shows up as RAW in the disk manager. I found a program called "Recover My Files". You can download and run it. You only have to pay for it if it can actually recover files and you want to save them. I was able to get back approx. 90% of my music files using this program! It was time consuming work, but the program only cost $67 (a small fraction of what a data recovery service would charge) and it saved me hours and hours of my time.
pmilne
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July 14th, 2005 10:00
Maxtor are a great help, check the cables, try a different usb socket etc. Obviously none of this helps one bit.
From the various forums ive seen this seems to affect the whole drive. My problem is just on three folders which contain several hundred tiff / jpg images from my digital camera.
So i cant understand why some of it works and some doesnt.
The only thing i ran was a recommended third party defragmenter. But again all the other drives on the computer and ex-h/d work fine.
Dilemmas
samdogmom
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July 14th, 2005 12:00
My guess is that these files are stored in a bad sector on the drive. I couldn't recover my mp3 files that were around the bad sector. But, before you give up, try the "Recover My Files" program to see if it can find your missing jpegs. You can get the program here:
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/. I used the fast format recover option. Good luck--I hope you can get back your photos!