F drive recognized but not reading

I have XP pro on a Dell machine with a Maxtor 3000LE external drive that has been working perfectly until this week as hard drive F.

Now, on bootup, the red light just keeps flashing and the boot takes forever and it keeps on trying while it loads the desktop icons--very slowly--and the F drive does appear on "my computer" as a hard drive. However, it cannot be read for some reason.

I hooked it up to a Compaq with Windows 98 and it had no problem reading it, so it's not the cable or the drive. I moved the printer into the port it was on and it works fine, so it's not that. I restored to a point prior to when it started giving me trouble and it still did not work, so it doesn't seem to be software. I thought it might be a corrupted driver, but I can't find an XP driver for the 3000LE.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks! Margot

 

I'll try it when I get home

but, since it is assigned a letter already, I'm not sure it will help.

I haven't loaded SP2 yet, so maybe I should try getting set up for that and loading it. I've heard it can fix some things while it mucks up others.

 

Hi Margot,

You may wish to try reinstalling the USB Controller drivers and maybe check Dell for any update on those.

Matt

 

Thanks, Matt

I'm discouraged after reading about all the folks that have had this problem and posted on the internet.

Fortunately, I was able to grab my unbacked-up data by hooking it up to the Win98 machine, so I'm not in too big a pickle. However, I don't think even if I can get it to work I will ever trust it again. I'll try a few more things including what you suggested.

By the way, does anyone have any recommendations for stable external harddrives? I think I'm in the market...

 

Thank you.