External USB2 Hard drive problem

[Guest]

I run a Maxtor 3000LS (40Gig) USB2 external hard drive on
a Windows XP system. The drive is recognized by Windows
but can't be read. I have 10Gig of files on the
drive. "My Computer" shows the drive but without any
files. When I try to access the files I get a message
that I need to format the drive. The Properties Window
for the drive show no space available. The XP Computer
Management tool shows that a 37 Gig Partition is Healthy
on the drive, and it shows the partition as 100% available.
Are my files recoverable? What is the cause of the
problem?

 

[Mary Sauer]

Maxtor has support documents
http://tinyurl.com/3u4la

 

[Bob Harris]

I have a Maxtox 3000 LE (120 Gig, USB 2). I plugged it into XP and it was
automatically recognized, so in general what you are doing should work.

Does XP assign a drive letter (like D:\, E:\, F:\...)? If not, then you may
need to do that manually from the XP disk managment tool.

By the way, what was the history of this drive? For example, if it came
from a MAC or a LINUX computer, then the format could be incompatible with
XP. But, if it came from 98 or ME, then it would be FAT32, which XP can
handle fine. I am less sure about 2000. That would be NTFS, but it could
be a different version than the one on XP.

Assuming that a drive letter has been assigned, you might learn something by
trying the read-only version of CHKDSK. Open a command prompt and type
"CHKDSK X:", without quotes and using the XP-assigned drive letter instead
of "X:".

And, you might try the disk on some other computer to verify that the disk
is actually OK.

 

[Guest]

None that I have found are at all helpful. Have you any
specific ones in mind?