Maxtor one touch 3 not being deetcted

tushin

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May 30, 2009
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I have a maxtor one touch 3 mini USB edition 160gb drive bought about two years ago. This drive was working fine till about a couple of months back when the USB cable got fried. I replaced the cable which resolved the problem. After a couple of months, suddenly the drive is not being detected by the computer as an external hard drive. Device manager recognizes a USB mass storage device but when i try to use My Computer to read the drive, it just hangs. The system begins responding immediately if i disconnect the drive. I downloaded the system software from the seagate website and installed it to no avail.
I run a DELL Vista(x64) Home Premium operating system entirely up to date. Please help as I have some important data stored on the drive!
 

navysealbrian

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Jan 18, 2006
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Inside the enclosure is an internal HDD. You should pull it out and put it into desktop to test it. If it works, something is wrong with the enclosure, the USB cable, possibly the power adapter, or even the controller in the enclosure. Most likely, the HDD is going bad. Maxtor was probably one of the worst HDD manufacturers...
 
It may well be the USB/SATA interface, I had the same issue with a Seagate Ext drive but breaking it out of the enclosure and connecting directly cured the problem. Seagate and Maxtor are one and the same by the way.
 

tushin

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May 30, 2009
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thank you very much!
i will try this as soon as i get the cable and post back. anything i need to be careful abt or watch out for?