External HD Not Recognized. (code 10)

Hello,

This thing is Driving me crazy and I would like some advice.

I have this Mad Dog Hard Drive Enclosure, with a 40 gig hard disk inside. I have had it for years and it has never given me trouble until recently. I run Win XP on my desktop and I began to notice that when I would boot the system and the mad dog was on, it would take forever for the system to load. When it was off , loading didn't take as long. When I turned the Drive back on it loaded as normal.

That is until yesterday. I wanted something off the drive. When I turned it on nothing happened. I heard the sound that said a device was connected to the computer. I heard the sound that says it was disconnected. but No autorun screen, no acknowledgment, nothing. Clicking the icon for the drive leads to an error message that says there is no such device.

I haf unplugged the poer sours to reset all of the usb drives on the mainboard, no good. I tried to update the drivers, no use . I tried troubleshooting, the troubleshooting screen came up blank. Going through the Device manager, I get a yellow exclamation point. The message in properties box says "This device cannot start. (Code 10) - Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device"

When I plug the mad dog into my laprop (running Win &) i get the same connect/disconnect acknowledgment... but nothing else .

What do I do now ?

 

I had the same problem and it sounds as though its on the way out.

If you can get to it via a dos/command prompt, try a chkdsk /f, but if it's not being recognised in windows, it's unlikely. If your data is important, you may need a professional recovery service.
Try it on another machine too.

1TB ones are around $100 where I live. You might have to bite the bullet.

 

Chances are the drive inside the enclosure is OK, and the circuit board in the enclosure is failing. I have seen numerous MadDog enclosures fail. Take the thing apart and remove the hard drive, then hook it up to your motherboard directly as a slave/secondary drive (you may need to temporarily disconnect a CD/DVD drive to do so), boot to Windows on your normal drive C:, and you should be able to access the data on the 40gb drive by opening 'My Computer' and browsing to the drive. Be sure to unplug the main power cord from your PC before opening the case to connect the drive. You can also install the drive into a different enclosure if you have one, but you may not want to buy another enclosure until you're certain the drive is healthy.
:-D