external Maxtor not seen

i had a system which i salvaged a Maxtor 200G HD from, and put it in a Tandy "MadDog multimedia" external case. It has it's own power supply, and connects via USB.
I have been using it as needed for "cold storage" without an issue, until today. Now it isn't showing up, but it lights up and i here the HD spinning up (nothing sounds different then the last, oh say, dozen times, i have tried several different things including using seatools for windows diagnostic download.

any ideas?

 

Have you tried unpluging the usb connection, rebooting, and then pluging it back in?

 

yes, and even rebooted with the drive "on ", usually boot up then after everything is up, then turn on external

 

I don't remember where I saw this but, there was a post on another site suggesting someone who had this problem had uninstalled firewire 1384 and it apparently fixed the problem.

I'll do some checking to see if I can find it again.

Mitch

 

Have you tried connecting it to another computer? That will tell you whether the drive is the problem or the computer.

 

okay, tried my dell LapTop, and it "sees" the USB adapter, but not the HDD.so i guess it is dead?

 

Look in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management, is it listed there? If not, it is probably dead, but maybe disconnect and reconnect it in the case again.

You could try connecting it into another laptop, but you may not want to do it on your new laptop, since it will be under warranty. It may be futile though, especially if Seatools cannot see it.

Matt

 

If Matt and Arie's suggestions don't provide any relief, you may want to remove the drive from the case, slave it in another machine, boot using a Win98 startup disk and FDISK the drive, removing all partitions. If you can get that far, put it back in the external case, hook it back up and see if Windows recognizes it. Should you get lucky, you can use Disk Management to initialize it and then reformat it.