aiki

Hallo,

1 week ago I got an external USB Harddisk (MaxtorOne Touch III: 7200RPM 500GB) and I pluged it into USB port. Windows gave automatically drive letter G: . All was fine, and I could save my data on it.

And today I restarted my PC and found that I could not find my drive in Windows explorer. There was no G: in windows explorer.
I opened Computer Management -> Disk Management, I could find there is a 500 GB Hard drive , healthy. But still I could not access it through windows explorer.
I also found in "Disk Management" that my maxtor drive was not assigned with drive letter (so now there is no G: ).

I thought that 500GB is too big for Windows, so I decided to make 4 primary partition.
I made the 1st 100GB partition and formatted it. Great, I could find in windows explorer 100GB drive (G: ) and I could access it.

Before I made the 2nd partition, I restarted my PC, and found that the 1st partition was not recognized (unknown partition; No G: again).
But Device Manager showed the disk drive and USB mass storage. (I attached 2 snapshots to this problem).

I tried to use all USB ports and tried another USB cable, but I got the same results. I even went to a friend, and tried to connect to his PC, I got the same result.

I returned to maxtor, and got a new HDD. I plugged into USB port, and I saw G: in windows explorer. Great... I restarted windows to see if that G: still there. And surprisingly that G: is gone. I haven't done anything to it. Just restart the windows, and my drive disappear from windows explorer.

I am using Laptop with windows XP SP2 (with latest update) and USB 2.0.

Can someone help me with this problem. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks a lot

Impulse666

Delete every partition on the external HDD, then reformat the entire disk (preferably in safe mode) as one partition NTFS. See if this all works well. If so then you can delete again and partition as you wish, but first try as one reformatted partition on NTFS. If you are planning on sharing this drive with a Windows 2000/9x/older or a Mac reformat (after initial full NTFS format) as FAT32.

It may do you some good to go through and make sure there is no data on the drive, even after reformatting, by running it through with killdisk.

See what happens and post back.

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