I have asked several people and searched high and low, all without help for this problem. I have a Maxtor OneTouch USB external HDD running on a Dell XPS410 with WinXP MCE. Twice now within a year for whatever reason when I go to click the icon to use the USB drive I get an error saying it’s either not formatted or doesn’t exist. I end up losing all my data and have to format and partition the drive.
Last week I upgraded to IE 8 and during it’s install to my “C” drive I saw that it unzipped install files to this USB drive. After it finished installing and setting up IE 8, my USB drive didn’t work. I got an error saying the drive is not formatted. When I tried to recover data from it everything said it was a 32gig not the 500gig it is.
I couldn’t recover anything so I used a program to write zeros on the drive, which took 4 days to do. I partitioned it, formatted it, and it seemed to be fine. I upgraded my iTunes program and while it was intalling the USB drive started up. I went to use the drive today and it tells me it’s not ready and asks if I want to format it. When I look at it through the device manager, it says it’s only 32gig.
This problem was happening to a WD USB external HDD I had too and tossed it assuming it was a bad drive.
I don’t know what to do. PLEASE, does can anyone help me?!
