Hey Guys,
I have a 250 GB maxtor external. I have had it for about a year and has always been a pain but I've managed. Anyhow, today I was trying to copy some files over to it but kept getting the cyclic redundancy check error. I decided to turn the drive off and back on again as that usually fixes problems. Well anyhow, when I turned it back it is connected because the little safely remove hardware thing pops up next to the time in the toolbar. The thing is it is now not recognized as a hard drive and I can not acess it. Do you know anything I can do to fix this? I usually just run chkdisk on it to fix problems but I cant even do that since its not showing up as a drive. Please if you know anything I can do I would grealty appreciate it, I really can not afford to lose everything on that drive.
Thanks so much,
Chris

i have also noticed that when I restarted the computer with the drive running it took the computer much longer to start than it did before this happened.

anyone? I would really appreciate it

I would say the drive is bad when your trying to copy certain files over and you getting that error. Just my two cents.

Right Click My Computer, then go to Manage and then Disk Management, scroll down and see if you see the drive, sometimes the drive letter gets used by something else and XP/2000 does not know what to do, so the drive does not show up. If you see the drive there, just change the drive letter and you should be set. I have seen this a lot with USB drives, conflicting with Mapped drives.

I hope that is what your problem is.

Yea I've tried to look for it like you said and it wont show up. I did use the maxblast program which can find it but cant find anything on the drive. Also, now it will not even turn on sometimes when I try to flip the switch on the case. I think it is definitely dying but is there anyway possible to be able to at least get some of the stuff on there to another hard drive?

Also, I will never buy a maxtor hard drive again, constant problems. Oh, and I had a quick question as well. I have a dell dimension 8200, and I was wondering when I get a new drive if it would be able to handle something over 250. Because I thought a while back I was reading some computers cant handle anything bigger than a 250 drive.
Thanks

Can you pull the HD out of the container and try to ghost it, or use a program to try to pull files off of it. Otherwise I believe you are screwed unless you want to drop around 1k to have a company pull the platters off and give you the data back.

Can you pull the HD out of the container and try to ghost it, or use a program to try to pull files off of it, like some hard drive recovery software. Otherwise I believe you are screwed unless you want to drop around 1k to have a company pull the platters off and give you the data back.

What program would you suggest to try to pull the data off with?
Thanks