Maxtor nightmare Maxtor One Touch Mini 4 external 160 Gb no longer recognized by computer. Any way to retrieve data? The disk still spins (I can feel it when I hold it in my hand), but the laptop (Windows XP) won't acknowledge it anymore. It's only a cuople months old, so I can get a new one, but even though THEIR device went bad, they want to charge me $1700 to restore data!!! Unbelievable!

Maxtor Manager is not available as a download but you could email Seagate to try to get the files

change usb cable.if doesn't work your usb interface is bad.(on hdd)

you have to "mount" the hard drive..... search that terms out in conjunction with your operating system name and you should be okay

Windows may be recognizing the drive but not assigning a drive letter for some reason. you may need to go to disk management and look for the drive there.

to do so go to control panel/administrative tools/computer management

once computer management is up find disk management, inside you will find all the drives that are connected to your computer, you should find your drive, If you do not then the drive may be bad or you are having usb issues.
If the drive is there but does not have a drive letter assigned to it, this may be because another drive has taken the letter normally assigned to it, you will need to right click on it and say "assign drive letter"

Let me know if this helps.

Try unplugging both the power and data cables from both the computer and the hard drive. Let the hard drive spin down. Plug the cables back in. It should become visible with no loss of files.

the hard disk interface could be broken, open the hard disk case and use it as an internal hard disk as a slave in a computer to save your data

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you are describing a hard disk failure.

Maxtor, Hitachi and IBM disks have unusually high failure rates. I have replaced hundreds of these disks.

I recommend replacing with a Seagate or Western Digital disk.

If this helps please vote for my solution.

Please Make sure you External Hard disk USB cable is working correctly. Your cable is probably having partial contact, so try another cable

go to my computer proeprty then uninstall usb driver and then right clik any driver then clik on scan for hardware then it searches usb and install automatically.

Try to remove the drive and connect it directly to another computer.
If still doesn't spin up then most likely the board has failed.