This past Friday, the 3rd December, 2004 while in the middle of a System Restore, my system was interrupted by a local power outage. Since then my Maxtor 5000/120 GB External Hard Drive has been acting oddly. I first noticed a problem when rebooting the system when a "CHKDisk" for my Maxtor Drive was scheduled, which seemed to take quite a long time during the first of 3 phases. During the first phase it simply kept listing files on the Maxtor which were "unreadable". I simply escaped from this and attempted to reboot. Each time I reboot, the "CHKDisk" begins again, even though it's easy to cancel it.

The next issue relates to "Add/Remove" Programs under the Control Panel for Windows. The Maxtor Drive prevents the "Add/Remove" Programs window from being populated.

All scans by NORTON are also prevented when it gets to scanning the Maxtor drive.

While it is usually easy to access any file in the Maxtor Drive, now it is laborious and no file opens without excessive wait times. All files appear to be there. I already reformatted the drive from Fat to NTFS at time of purchase.

Six times I've uninstalled and reinstalled the Maxtor software and disconnected the drive and reconnected it only to face the same problems I previously listed.

I contacted DELL, my cpu manufacturer but they were of little assistance...their Tech first had me go online to check for adware and spamware, then suggested I contact Maxtor, then download drivers for the Maxtor Hard Drive (which I had already done), then suggested I reformat the drive, again, and last but not least the old stand-by when in doubt, reinstall my OS! I don't know who's problem this is really, because, when I disconnect the Maxtor Drive from my system everything is fine, no issues beyond not being able to use my Maxtor for the reason I acquired it...Back-Up!

This is my first system problem resulting from a power outage and I'm clueless! Can anyone assist me with resolution of this issue?

Charles

I think your hard drive got damaged because of the power outage.
If I where you, I would backup what I need from the hard drive and reformat it.
I don't think it's a problem with the software. It is more likely that it is the hard drive itself that is causing the problem, formatting the drive could solve your problems.

You really should allow Chkdsk to finish. I know it will take a while with that big drive, but you could easily have some corrupted/damaged sectors that can be fixed.

I had a similar problem with my Maxtor 5000 Personal Storage unit (but no lightning strike). It just spontaneously stopped working. So I did this:

1. unplugged the power cable and let it cool down over night.

2. switched the firewire cable to the other port on the 5000

3. plugged the power cable back in

I verified that the drive did indeed spin up. If you put your hand on it and listen you can feel and hear the drive spin up. Also, there are some lights on the circuit board that you can see through the case. These are the same lights that are on the front panel (amber and green).

amber only -- firewire cable only

green only -- power cable only

amber + green -- firewire cable and power cable


I can't tell you why switching the firewire cable to the other port helped, but it did. I was able to get the drive working just long enough to get the data off of it. I know that my firewire cable is OK, so I suspect that it is the port on the drive.

Before I switched the firewire cable, I wasn't able to talk to the drive at all. Note that it had been *failing* over the past week as the I/O errors and delayed write error popup boxes increased. But I couldn't get a replacement disk before the point where I couldn't talk to the 5000 at all.


Lots of people have had problems with this unit. I had also tried installed new drivers but that didn't help. Maxtor's 3100 disk utility doesn't work either since there isn't a USB port on the 5000 (the 3100 utility seems to expect a USB drive).

Bottom line is that if the drive actually spins up, you may be able to futz around and get it working long enough to get the data off. Wiggle this, jiggle that, move this from here to there, etc. But as soon as I got the data off, I trashed the drive. The reviews on CNET from users have been pretty bad and lots of folks are having trouble with this unit.

Hope this helps...

Scott