Okay as a preamble to this I'm going to try to spell out in as much detail as I can all the info I can, so I apologize
for what may be a lengthy intro and I am not all that computer literate as most of what i know about this issue i learned in the last 2 days.......:
So I have a Maxtor OneTouch III 320GB external HDD, I use it to back up documents and aslo to hold my music and digital photos. I have had this drive for about three years with no problems what so ever, until last night. I Originally used this device on an HP Pavilion 7955 desktop running Windows XP with all the OEM it came with including an additional stick of 512MB of RAM i installed several years back. I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook that runs Vista about 1 year ago and had been using the Maxtor with no problems until recently.
I Had password protected the Maxtor for about the past month and have noticed that what was supposed to be a "plug and play" device was not behaving as such, at times I would turn it on and the drive would request the password right away, other times I would have to turn it off and back on, maybe 3 or 4 times to get it to register. I researched the problem and found that there was an issue with Vista and having the password protection on, so I decided to hook up the drive to my XP powered desktop.
Now I believe there was an "accident" involving a dog where the Maxtor my have been bounced around some, so I was concerned that this could have something to do with it, and yesterday, before attempting to hook it back up to the desktop I had noticed the drive did not spin up like it seemed to do most every time i turned it on.
So I plugged USB into the desktop, turned it on, and like usual I saw the Info bubble in XP that said my device could run faster on a USB 2.0 port but would still work as is. However, the "auto-play" never started and when I looked in My Computer i could not see the drive. I then proceeded to access the Maxtor via the supplied software, the software told me there was no Maxtor drive detected. So I went into Disk Management and looked at the USB port I had plugged it into (and forgive me here, this is where my expertise lacks) The USB showed that it had a "USB Mass Storage Device" connected but it had a Yellow Exclamation mark, I looked into this and it said "(Code 10) This Device does not work" (not sure on the exact wording). I Disconnected the Maxtor, tried it in another "spare" desktop we have, with the same results.
Needless to say I was getting very frustrated and angry at this point in time, worrying that I had lost all of my music and pictures. So now I began to think that maybe the HDD itself was physically damaged or incapable of spinning up properly, so I had the idea of trying to dismantle the Maxtor, remove the HDD and see if I could somehow plug it directly into the XP desktop and see if it would at least spin up. \
Now I am fairly mechanically inclined and am able to take apart somewhat complex things and piece them back together, so I figured I was up to the challenge. I found a YouTube video showing how to dismantle my particular drive and proceeded to do so, now I did not notice any overt damage to either the HDD itself or the pc card that controls it and supplies power via the plug and USB ports on the back.
I then researched how to connect a 2nd HDD to my desktop, now granted before last night i did not know what a jumper, IDE, Master/Slave, or any of these things were, but i was/am determined to figure this out if possible. So I found in my desktop the IDE cable that connects to it's HDD (it's an 80GB) and saw that the plug says "Master" printed below it, now the same cable also has a 2nd inline plug that has "Slave" printed by it, there is also an unused power supply connector in there as well
So I moved the Jumper on the Maxtor's HDD to "Slave" according to the diagram printed on it, plugged in the IDE cable, plugged in the power, prayed, then plugged the desktop back in and started it up. So the desktop started up as normal, and much to my delight I could feel and hear the maxtor's HDD spinning up. Windows stared normally and I thought maybe the drive would just show up, it was not in My computer, so I decided to call it a night as it was 10:30 and I get up at 4 for work.....
So here I sit asking for help in this forum before I try anything else. So my real questions are: Have I gone about this right now far and what can I do to make this work?
Is it even possible for me to use the HDD as almost "plug and play" and still be able to get all my music etc off of this thing? Obviously I cannot reformat the disk as that will erase all my info.
My ultimate goal here is to be able to once again access the drive then eventually move the info back onto a new and more reliable external drive, but not BEFORE also backing up all of this on DVD's as my lesson there is learned, but hopefully not at the cost of all my music and pictures.
Thanks for the Help and reading through the long post, I just thought the more info I provided the more helpful the answers may be!
