[HELP] Portable hard disk Error

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aleyshark

New Member
Product:

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini

Case:

it's been fine since I bought it until yesterday.
Everytime I double-click my portable drive from windows explorer, a new window keeps appearing and reads "Please choose a program you want to use to open this file:"

I thought it was a virus/trojan since I downloaded some movies yesterday, so I scanned the whole drive with newly updated Norton Antivirus 2008
Results: No threats/viruses are found

Anybody has any solution?

Thank you very much in advance
 

PC eye

banned
Is that a usb model? If it has a power button try turning that off and back on to see the auto run appear for choosing the setup.exe file. That will restart the installer for the software that comes with the drive itself. Never unplug one of those while a system is running since that knocks them out. Windows now needs to redetect the drive like you threw a cd in an optical drive.
 

PC eye

banned
If you can view the drive itself in explorer you should be seeing at least an auto run file at the root. When first detected by Windows you are presented with the installation options menu to see the drive's software installed.

If the drive gets knocked out you then simply turn it on while in Windows to see the auto run go to work or quickly unplug and replug the power plug from the ac adapter. Generally you see the drive turned off when shuting everything down if there's no separate switch for power on the drive itself as seen with the more expensive models. When first turning the system on that should also come on as well.
 

aleyshark

New Member
Or you could actually fix it by either of the following:

1) Run the command prompt. (start-> run-> type "cmd")
2) Type "<drive letter>: dir /a/p
3) Check whether there is a file named autorun.inf
4) Then type "attrib autorun.inf -s -h -r "
5) Next, type "del autorun.inf"

Works perfectly after restart! Thx a lot man:)
 

PC eye

banned
What version of Windows are you running there? Most portables drives see a Fat32 type partition so both Windows and Apple/Mac will be able to use the small program preinstalled on the drive itself. With 2000/XP/Vista you simply reformat that to NTFS and no longer need anything of that. Windows automatically detects it as another logical dirve.

Now that Seagate bought up Maxtor that's where to look for the troubleshooting guide. http://seagate.custhelp.com/cgi-bin...y5zZWFyY2hfbmwmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=&p_topview=1
 

cdanik

New Member
Be careful with the maxator HD's they are very sensitive. I have had some bad experiences with those HD's. One time I lost the entire drive's data, and the next time it went bad after a couple of years of use, but I did get that one fixed with Disk Recovery (or something like that.)
 

PC eye

banned
The external drives are usually seeing a lack of detection if you simply leave the original Fat32 partition alone and somehow the auto run is lost. The manufacturers have a zip you can download once registared due to restricted access that you simply unpack onto the external model.

By seeing the Fat32 swapped over to NTFS Windows 2000, XP, and Vista alike no longer need to see the drive program even installed and reedily detect the NTFS partition it seems. You'll note that is also recommended by Seagate on the support page seen there.
 

SirKenin

banned
yw aley.. Sorry PC doesn't give up and keeps on rambling stupidity.. He's desperately hoping he can attain credibility after the fact, and does it in just about every damn thread "as seen there <insert completely irrelevant wiki link here>"

Glad you got it fixed.

*sigh*
 
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