I have an i-rocks 3.5 usb/firewire combo external hard drive that seems to be malfunctioning. When i turn it on, it doesn't boot correctly and my computer doesn't recognize it. It continues to make this clicking noise and the red indicator light on the back flashes as the clicking noise occurs, then it eventually retries. What can i do?

click start control panel administrive tools ,computer management ,device manager look through all of your devices if you see a yellow question mark?or exclamation mark ! or red x
right click to reinstall drivers or
if you can see your usb but its not working
ports(com&lpt)right click update driver
sometimes the wires inside the cable will be damaged due to bending or stretching or placing heavy equipment upon the cable,
just replace the cable of the hard disk, when you plugged the external disk drive you got that windows could recognize the USB device change the cable everything should work fine again,

check the USB leads that attach to the motherboard usually red-white-green-black make sure they are securely seated and have no dust build up on them dust will cause static and a lot of unforeseen problems also make sure the computers Ram and Cmos battery are securely seated
if this fails to fix the problem
you might have to install a usb 2 or 3 card they are cheap and easy to install you can buy these on Ebay very cheap
hope this helps
a cnet rview
Pros: Lots of space, very low price, doesn't require outside power
Cons: Sometimes stops working, no firewire (but still a quick transfer speed)
Summary: This doesn't require outside power, but sometimes you need to hook it up to 2 USB ports. The USB cable has 2 heads. Sucks when I only have 3 USB ports on my laptop.

Also sometimes it spontaneously stops communicating with the computer. I don

Hello,
it is a known issue that these particular drives sometimes don't get recognized by the Operating System, after coming out of Sleep, Stand By, or Hibernation.
Simply try to disconnect and reconnect the drive again in the USB port, if this doesn't work then, Disconnect it from the USB and connect it to the Firewire. if this doesn't work then, Restart the computer.
It should solve the problem.

If you have another Macintosh that is working correctly, you can copy the contents of that hard-drive, including the Operating System onto an external hard drive.
To do this, install Carbon Copy Cloner on the working machine and plug in an external hard-drive. Then run Carbon copy cloner and make the source the computer's hard drive most likely named "Macintosh HD". Then choose to have your external hard drive be the drive where all of the data is copied. Then run the program and let it copy all of the files.
Once this is done, remove the external drive from the computer and plug it into your G3. Turn on your G3 while holding the Option (alt) key and then double click on the hard-drive image that is named whatever your external hard-drive is named.
Once your system boots up from the external hard drive, run Carbon Copy Cloner again and repeat the process again except have the source be your external drive and have the internal drive in your G3 be the disk that has all the data copied to it. Once this is done, turn off your computer, remove the external drive, and then boot up your computer again.
You will have an exact clone of the computer that you copied the data from and will just simply need to adjust the account settings as such as you see fit.

The external drive process can be skipped if you have a firewire cable. Simply connect the firewire cable to both computers and when you turn on your G3, hold the "T" key. This will turn your G3 into an external hard drive and you just have to carbon copy the files straight to your computer's internal hard drive.
If you do not have access to another computer mac computer, then you will need to go to the Apple Store and see if the Genius Bar can install the default operating system that your computer came with.
If for some odd reason you have the contents of an Mac OS install disc copied onto a flash drive or external hard drive, you can boot from that and use it in place of a disc.

The Xbox 360 can only recognize drives up to 16GB as noted on their website, I myself have tried a 32GB flash drive to test the limitations and it was not recognized. At this time it seems as though microsoft is limiting their external storage to 16GB.
http://support.xbox.com/en-us/Pages/xbox-360/how-to/usb-flash-drive.aspx

Sounds like the hard drive is having an issue. It may be too late but you can try to freeze your hd and recover the data.

Usually when the drive makes a weird sound it means it's going out .If you can try plugging it into another device and see if it does the same thing . Good Luck

Don't connect the USB and firewire at the same time, use one or the other. In general for USB, for the very first connection, it is better to have the computer fully booted, and the MyBook spun up, before connecting the USB cable. After that, you can boot the computer with or without the MyBook connected or turned on. For the firewire connection, check your manual for the correct order of connection and power on.

USB and firewire 400 are roughly comparable. USB is theoretically a little faster, but you will see little difference. There are other factors that can affect your actual performance, so your best answer is to try a test yourself. Time a copy of a very large file, and a copy of a folder with a very large number of files.

Hi, Normally the steps would be: 1. In your PC, in the System Tray, click on the "Safely Remove Hardware" and then on the "Safely Remove USB Mass Storage Device-Drive(?); 2. Unplug USB cable; 3. Power down external device. Hope this be of some help/idea. Good luck and kind regards.

You say have a SanMax HD-338-CB USB/Firewire External HD with a 160MB drive. You then say sometimes I have to reboot Windows XP pro 2 or 3 time before I see the drive using a USB 2.0 connection. Fire wire is a different system with a different connector style- so it should not be in a USB port or a USB connector should not be in a Firewire device. Get you device and connections sorted The desktop display simply puts up a device it will not differentiate which USB or Firewire

For the WD HDD, you need to set the jumper as Single or Master

For other HDD, you need to set as Master