the disappearing external USB drive mystery!

I'm guessing that this might be a Windows XP thingy that I am tripping over.

I have a 2004 Dell Dimension with XP home and all service patches up to date. I use Norton Save and Restore to make daily incremental backups to an external Maxtor USB drive. When I started that process, I followed an article from the Microsoft knowledge base to assign a drive letter "G" to the external hard drive, as well as assign drive letters to other devices that the computer treated as drives (e.g., a SanDisk card reader).

This has been working great for several months.

On April 10, without my noticing, Norton was unable to find the drive. I noticed this around April 20. I tried seeing the drive with Windows Explorer; invisible. I tried seeing the drive with Device Manager; it is visible to Device Manager.

I did one unusual thing in April that might have caused this, but I don't know how it could have. I used the XP Network Wizard to set up a network so I could share my printer through my D-Link wi-fi router with my MacBook laptop.

After doing that, and not having success with laptop to printer communication, I tried using the XP Wireless Network Wizard to do the same thing.

Right now, I don't care about the printing, I need my external USB drive to be useable to Norton Save and Restore. confused

All help is appreciated.

 

Have a look here:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Easy to use, highly configurable program, and best of all, it's free to home users.
Well worth a donation though, I reckon.

 

Just in case it may help someone, here's how I fixed it.
The Windows event log showed some kind of page fault on the drive.
The Windows Drive Management software showed a big red no-go on the drive and allowed only the "initialize drive" command. It also showed a greyed-out "partition drive" command.
With nothing to lose, I executed the "initialize drive". This took only a few seconds. After that, I was able to execute the "partition drive" command. I did not stick around while it did that, so I don't know the total time.
Once complete, the Drive Management software showed the drive as healthy in both the graphic and text representations.
All software was then able to access the drive normally.