I have an external Maxtor HD (160GB) that I have hooked up in an external HD case and connected to my PC via firewire. It had always worked fine before, and it was great for the first few months, but yesterday, for no reason at all, I switched on the drive and it didn't do its usual blinking sequence. The lights switched on, but I knew already that something wasn't right. I went to My Computer and lo and behold, the three drives (I had partioned the Maxtor into different drives) were all missing.
So I restart, plug it into different ports, download a windows update that's supposed to correct that problem ( microsoft.com, try to revert the firewire drivers back to SP1, everything. I've tried everything, and nothing works. When I go into control panel, system, hardware, and then look at the device manager, I actually see the external HD on the list. But it has a yellow exclamation point next to it. I go to properties, and it says:
Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems (Code 43).
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If my files were to be somehow wiped out, or corrupted, or if the drive has to be reformatted, then it would be a disaster. All the audio files (and some video) from my project "Shroud of the Dark Side" were on that disk, and I only backed up some of it, thinking that the external HD was reliable.
Do you think it's just the external case gone bad? Is there any chance that my files are somehow irretrievable? Later today, I'm going to try putting the HD in a different case, and if that doesn't work, actually installing the Maxtor into the body of the computer.
Any help would be really appreciated. I'm scared to death about this...
-TM