External Hard Drive Problem

Alright im having a problem with an external Maxtor hard drive 7200 rpms its used for my laptop so i use a Firewire 6 pin to 4 pin cable. The model of the hard drive is Personal Storage 3000DV. It doesn't show up anywhere and its beginning to bug me. Yes it is plugged in, yes i have tried different cables. It just all of a sudden didn't show up one day and I don't wanna lose 50 gigs of stuff i have on it =( I would be thankful for any help. o yeah i tried it on my step dad's laptop it saw it but couldn't do anything with it and its not my part cuz other hard drives work perfectly with the same cable

 

Thats the error I get when I try to get info im running XP Home

 

what does it say in Disc Management? start>control panel>admin tools>comp management

 

this is the only place it will see it

 

alright at this point im just gonna format it i've tried cmd and that normally always works but it says Drive Specified Could Not Be located or does not exhist . Any ideas?

 

Did you say that windows does not see that drive through disk manager, which is located within computer manager?

Pyrate gave the instructions in how to get there.

Also, you have no errors within device manager?

 

it does not see it in Disc Management and yes it says no errors

 

try this:

hit the windows key + r ... then type cmd

type the following at the prompt:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

then goto the device manager and see if it shows up, try scanning for new devices ... also take a look at your firewire port itself and see if there are errors there

How often did you defrag the drive? and how old is it? how much use did it get? The partition table may have become corrupted or it's possible that the drive has become damaged ... you might try to do a full test with the maxtor utility to check for hardware damage, don't confuse the full test with writing zeros though .. lol

 

I defraged it like one a week or everyother week, its about a year and a half old give or take a few months, it got about 8 or 9 hours of use a week, and what maxtor utility? and I did the thing you told me to do it showed up in the device manager but not in My Computer but remember at this point i'll settle just for formatting it i can get the data back but it will just take time so reformatting ill do Lol it shows up in the Safely Remove Hardware tray and the firewire port works with other hard drives but one of the 4 holes in it does seem to be clogged but I figured since other drives work fine why not this one?

 

if it shows up in the device manager now, why don't you try reinstalling the driver?

 

here's two of maxtors utilities:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...tware Downloads/ATA Hard Drives&downloadID=58
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...tware Downloads/ATA Hard Drives&downloadID=22

the first runs within windows and the other you create a bootable floppy .. of course if you can see your drive now they aren't too helpful ... unless you insist on formatting

 

its not an ATA hard drive its a firewire external hard drive ATA is internal

 

oh ... my bad ...

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/M...channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software Downloads

I don't know which one you have so you have to scroll down a bit ... select "external hard drives" then select which one fits your drive the best .. I'm guessing personal storage 5000 winXP?

if you already haven't try reinstalling the driver via the device manager