External hard drive/power outage

[Guest]

Using Maxtor Onetouch III Turbo with Windows Vista. Nearly completed a copy
of system when power went out. Have surge and pc and drive both work. Tried
shutdown and restart of Maxtor. Driver software comes up and allowed a
diagnostic check which stated drive is running properly. However, am unable
to reset, choose files to copy from system or run copy function on Maxtor.
Will uninstall, re-install driver software and reformat/partition of drive
allow normal usage, or is this drive history? If this is the way an external
drive doesn't work, I won't be transferring any of my cd's anytime soon.......
Any thoughts would be appreciated on this end. Thanks!

 

[Guest]

Hi, I once had the power cable fall out of the socket on the back of my p.c.
when it was booting up. Totally scrambled the HDD and I had to re-format and
start from scratch. Don't know how to fix your problem but it doesn't sound
promising. I always use a UPS now, just in case, (although it doesn't protect
you from power cables falling out on the p.c. side of the UPS!)

 

[Guest]

I had another idea. Have you tried to contact Maxtor for advice?

 

[Guest]

It all depends on what the power surge scrambled. If it just scrambled the
writing to disk - then it's likely that a format will fix it. If it surged
through the PCB on the hard drive - then the drive may be "toast".

Since the diagnostics say that the drive is OK, I'd suspect that it is OK -
but you'll have to format it to find out for sure.

Good luck!

- John

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the thoughts from both David and usama.

Maxtor is now owned by another company and they have absolutely no customer
support that I can render from their web site. I've read other info about
this company elsewhere and others have no luck with customer support.

I'll try to re-format, if that's at all possible......

Thanks for your suggestions!

 

[Guest]

Additional post on this problem with a power outage and external hard drive
not responding.
Twice when I restarted from shutdown, about an hour an a half later I
received a balloon message from the Maxtor hard drive saying that it couldn't
complete the copy (as I don't always have the drive connected). After the
second time, I decided that I'd re-connect the hard drive, restart from
shutdown and then wait. Exactly what I'd determined would happen, the drive
was trying to finish the original copy from days before. After it cycled
through, I was able to access the screens to choose which areas of my system
to copy from the Maxtor software, and was able to make a new copy.
This was a case of the program thinking that it was still running, even
after a disconnect and shutdown. Try this for anyone who may have similar
problems with an external drive. It saved a lot of re-formatting that I
thought would have to be done.