Maxtor OneTouch - Vanishing / Reappearing Partition

[ScottEmerson]

Hello all,

I've done a lot of searching on numerous forums and, while I've found descriptions of problems similar to mine, I have yet to find a solution that has worked for my system.

I'm running a WIN XP system with a Pentium Dual-core processor. I recently installed a Maxtor OneTouch 4 HDD USB drive with an external power source. My problem is that usually upon boot-up the Maxtor's partition is not recognized, leading to a prompt from the Maxtor software to reformat. Predictably, this also means that the drive is unassigned and shows up as "unallocated" in the Disk Manager window.

The odd part is that sometimes the drive IS recognized on boot-up and shows up under My Computer with the proper drive letter assigned (E: for the Maxtor, with C: for the internal system drive and D: for the DVD Drive). When this happens, I am able to access the Maxtor normally and with no data loss (so far.) I have tried to track down what variables might be causing the drive to be recognized or unrecognized, but so far no luck. If anyone has any advice I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

S. Emerson

 

[vacunita]

Perhaps its taking a little longer to rev up, and is not 100% ready by the time the machine boots up.

What happens if you disconnect and reconnect the drive from the machine when its not recognized, does it get recognized then?


Maybe unrelated, but do you have any network drives mapped? they sometimes prevent USB drives from getting the drive letters they want.




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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[BadBigBen]

It could be just a power issue, where upon boot up the drive draws too much power thus the USB port turns off, and later rectifies itself, but does not initialize the HDD attached...

workaround: Try a powered USB HUB or a PCI USB 2.0 card, they are pretty cheap...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[ScottEmerson]

Thanks for the replies, folks. The partition becomes readable when I unplug / replug while the system is on, so I think the notion of an electrical hiccup at startup is worth investigating.

Thanks again,

-S