Hi,

Just in need of some help. I've had my Maxtor Basics 250GB external hard drive for around half a year now, been working fine without any problems. I recently gave it to a friend to borrow to copy a few things over onto their laptop.

I got a phone call two days ago saying that all of a sudden it stopped working, so I've got it back today and had a look and I've plugged it into my PC, my other laptop and even my TV and nothing has happened, the light at the front of the hard drive doesnt even come on anymore either (usually a green light). This hard drive is USB powered so it has no power cable.

Although I did check the device manager on my PC and it showed one unrecognized device, when i tried to hit "look for hardware changes" it brought up plug and play and tried installing drivers through windows update and looked at previous installed drivers, that failed though..

Good thing is that its being recognized (kind off?) by the device manager, is there any solutions?

I had alot of my music and movies backed up on this hard drive so it would be sad to lose all of that

Heres a screen cap from my device manager:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/269/unkwon.png/

I've checked the Disk Management also but the only thing that appears is my C: drive..

Also, Under "Universal Serial Bus Controllers" in Device Manager, I have "USB Mass Storage Device" - when I click properties and Device Details.. it points to a driver in the system32/drivers folder but when I try to update the unkown device by pointing it to the system32/drivers folder it still fails..

My last resort would be to open it up as I'm not very handy with opening up computers and hardware. Im stumped :\

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Adam

Hi,

Please remove the drive from the USB box, and connect it directly to the computer to check if it spins or not.
If doesn't spin, please take a picture of the PCB and post it here.

Hi, thanks for the reply!

Just before I open it up, would it be worth buying a new USB cable and trying it out? Could the USB cable be the problem? Because the connector that goes into the hard drive feels very loose once its been attached..

If anything it would probably be the plug on the external, rather than the cable

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I bought a new cable but still nothing, so I will open it up and see what happens!

How would I connect it up to my PC? I'm not too good with the hardware side of things haha

Take a picture of your drive interface and your board and add it here, and I think you'll get help on that side.

I got it open:

http://i53.tinypic.com/f2lfrt.jpg

Is it damaged?

Looks OK to me.

I recommend forum member "buster80", he's in Glasgow and comes recommended

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http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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So that is a SATA connection.
Look at your motherboard and you should have there the main hard drive, that should be SATA also.
Check how the connections are made and try to do the same thing to that hard drive.