Maxtor Personal Stortage 3200 160GB external hard drive

Probably not the right answer for your problem. Mine is an external 1 TB Simple Drive. Mine wouldn't respond at all. I unplugged the power cable from the back of the hard drive and replugged it in and instantly it worked (with the computer and hard drive plugged in). I had tried rebooting the computer, plugging/unplugging over and over into the computer and that didn't work.

When you plug in via USB, does the USB recognize it and not display as HDD? If that is the case, then it's probably disabled somehow. Access Computer management, and check from there.

If that doesn't work, try on a different computer. If it doesn't work, your HDD has gone faulty. And if you recently changed your board, make sure you have a high speed USB port.

Until you put an Operating System, Windows, Linux etc, on the formatted drive, it will NOT recognize the drive, it will not recognize anything...

the problem is in one of your computers, try System Restore go to previous date at the problem.

Try connecting it to another computer.
If it is not detected, then either the disk-drive "inside" the unit is dead, or the "adapter" (USB-to-Disk-Drive) inside the unit is dead.

If the latter, disassemble the case, remove the disk-drive, and attach it as an "internal" hard-drive to your computer.

There's a good chance the shop you bought the drive from didn't have SP3 installed. For some reason, SP3 has an issue with USB peripheral devices. Windows has created a patch to rectify the problem. Click on the link below and install the "Fixit" patch to enable your PC to recognize your HD. Best of luck.
Greg
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925196#fixit4me

My Maxtor 3100 did work with my XP widow machine at one time. But suddently my computer doesn't recognize the USB connection. How do I fix this?

Proopt

actually telephone numbers are not available through this service...perhaps you will consider a premium or chat investment of your resources.

Hi Crkinard.. i think you shuld first find out whether the problem is with the external device or your computer... so check if the device is recognised by another system... as you have been using the device dor couple of years i think yours computer's drive for external devices should have been corupted.. so check out the device with some other computer.. if it is recognised in that computert then you can easily reinstalled the software for your device again..

Try some other USB device (memory-stick, printer, camera) in the USB slot in the Vista computer, just to "prove" that Vista will recognize _any_ USB device connected to that slot.