External hard drive not formatted

[livewire]

I have an external usb/firewire enclosure with a Maxtor 250 GB hard drive in it. I have been using it for over a year with my laptop running XP home. It works great in both USB and firewire modes. Even upgraded to SP2 with no problems. I have recently tried using the drive on my desktop which has XP pro with SP2. It recognizes the drive and usb/firewire adapter, and assigns a drive letter. But when I try to access the drive, it claims the drive is unformatted. Attaching it back to the laptop works just fine. Back on the desktop, not formatted. I even ran chkdsk on the desktop, and it recognized the drive with volume lable and everything, and said all was well. But explorer says the drive is unformatted. I get the exact same results whether it is hooked up usb or firewire. The drive was originally formatted with FAT32 and currently has about 100GB of info on it. I have verified that both machines have the exact same drivers loaded for both the drive, and the enclosure. From my testing I have eliminated several things.

- It is not a problem with the enclosure or drive.
- It is not a problem with the cables or power supply (enclosure has it's own power supply - not from usb/firewire).
- It is PROBABLY not a problem with the usb or firewire adapters on the desktop since they both act exactly the same (yes it is possible that they are both bad, but not likely since the drive is recognized on both)
- It is not a bios/large disk problem since the c drive is also a 250 GB hard drive with only one 250 GB partition.

The only difference in the operating systems is one is XP home (the one that works) and one is XP Pro (the one that doesn't work). Both are running SP2.

Any suggestions?

[Twill]

Sorry, I don't have the answer, but I have a similar problem. See my posting "External hard drive problem" on 29th march.
Mine's a new drive which I've dumped some data onto to see if it works, so I can play around without worrying if I loose the data.
On my laptop (windows 2000) it's formatted (NTFS). I connect it to my desktop (XP home) and it doesn't work. It assigns a drive letter to it, but tells me it's not formatted. I launch the formatting, but it fails.
Since my posting I've partitioned the drive and formatted part of it FAT32, and it works fine.

This probably doesn't help you, but at least you got an answer to your posting!

[tomleitch]

i have exactly the same prob with external 250gb maxtor. It works fine on the computer in the shop but not on mine. Any suggestions?

I have tried formating it in every way or partition size but to no avail - each time it gets to 99% and says format did not complete sucessfully, yet i watched the guy in the shop format it with no problems and use it to copy files on his machine.

[gloz]

I purchased an external hard drive about 2-3 years ago and used it quite a lot in the first 2 years. I haven't used it in about 8-12mths and now when i plug it it, it says I have to format it to use it... I've had files backed up on it for ages. There is no way to go about it unless I reformat it? (meaning I lose all my files??) Why did this happen??!

[Terralec]

I have a very similar problem with a Maxtor 250Gb Firewire HDD, it was working fine being used to backup to every other day until a few days ago when it decided to stop.

It now tells me that the drive is unformatted but it does see the drive and assign it a drive letter. It will not allow me to format it in FAT32, it tells me that it does not support drives of this size.

I have another of these drives wich still works fine.

[scorpious]

Some sites that can help with a large forum knowledge base,just type into google -
radified
cnet=look for forum
toms hardware = look for community in left column
microsoft
tech republic
overlcockers


or another way is to type a short description of your problem into google

There is a harddrive specialist site,unfortunatly i cannot find the bloom'n shortcut i made to it,don't delete anything on your hdd's as you will find the stuff can most probably be recovered

EDIT: i tracked down a hard drive site it's the last one in the above list tho not the one i mentioned

[webdealer]

I also have a Maxtor 250 External Hard Drive. Because of the size of the and to increase security I formatted this volume NTFS. It worked fine for about six months then it started acting strange. I would open folders that I new I had data in and they would be empty. Some folders I knew I created were gone mysteriously.

I researched the problem, contacted Maxtor. No solution. The problem persisted, I was running chksdk /x /f on a regular basis to repair what I could in NTFS. Eventually the drive failed. I tried it on several other computers both firewire and USB. The computers could see the drive but couldn't open any files. Finally I purchased a recovery utility and retrieved all (or most) of the data on the drive. In order to do this however I needed to purchase a drive of equal or larger size for the recovery process. Recovery takes a long time but it is the only way I know to retrieve the data from the disk.

I have been living with this for a couple of years now and here is what I have found. The early versions of this drive runs way too hot. Newer versions run much cooler. There are a lot of people that have had this or similar problems with this drive. It appears that may only happen with NTFS. I have not found anyone with a FAT 32 format that has the same type of problems. NTFS had similar problems when the file format was upgraded after NT 2.0 was created.

I suspect the overheated controller writes dirty bits to the drive which confuses NTFS. Eventually computer stops recognizing the drive format.

If you have important data on the drive move (or recover and move) the data. Use the drive as a spare or for non critical information.

Good luck