This is a very long story but i am desperate so i will try and type clearly and lay out as many details as i can.

WinXP Home
HP 750n PC
80gig internal primary hdd
300gig external maxtor one touch II

Issue: After about 3yrs my drive dissapeared from My Computer out of the blue. And of course im the idiot who had about 100gigs worth of irreplaceable data on there. I need this data back desperately ... and have learned the lesson of double backups

Symptoms:
- drive is not visible anywhere!

- When i plug it in, windows sees it

- Not listed in My Computer.

- admin tools>computer management>disc management = Does not show the drive

- control panel>system>device manager>disc drives = its there! Shows as Maxtor USB Mass Storage. properties says its working fine. I tried enable/disable, and also update driver. also tried uninstall/install; No change.

Some things i have tried:

1. i tried was rebooting a zillion times. unplugging, leaving it on, changing usb ports, etc.

2. tried removing from casing and installing into pc on ribbon cable as secondary

3. took to bestbuy and they sent it away for data recovery, they said they can retrieve 100% of the data but it will be a level 3 recovery and cost $1,800 ... my pockets aren't nearly that deep, so i had them send it back.

4. bought a new casing and hooked it up to several usb ports, nothing

5. downloaded a linux distro and ran it to see if linux would see the drive, it didnt

6. downloaded a diag tool from seagate called Seatools ... it didnt even see the drive

7. downloaded 3 other data recovery programs .. they can see the drive, but not the data

8. (i know this sounds ridiculous) i put drive in 2 zip lock baggies and put in freezer for 2hrs. a tip i found online .. but didnt work.

9. from device manager (the only place on my pc that can see the drive) i uninstalled it, then plugged back in and it reinstalled. this went smoothly but didn't work

I know from google searches that this is a very very common problem with maxtor, but i cannot find any solutions. some people that had similar issues had a flashing blue light which indicates a hardware failure, so they replaced the case and all was fine. My blue light doesn't flash. The drive spins nice and quietly, just as normal.

Can anyone recommend anything? Suggestions? websites? Forums? ANYTHING!?

I am stuck without this data and feel i have exhausted all resources on my own.

Thank you very much for reading this through

^^ awesome lol

Heya Rsarno,

If Best Buy data recovery told you it is 1800 dollars, that means that the internal mechanics of the drive is bad and they have to actually take the hard drive platters out to recover the data.

From the looks of it, you have tried every measure to get the drive going. I can't say I know any other thing to try at home.

If I ran into that situation, I would take the drive out of the casing, hook it up to my computer, pray that Windows sees the drive (if it doesn't I would try Bart's PE or another pre-install environment). If Windows or Bart's sees the drive, then I'd run a chkdsk /r /f and hopefully it would repair the problems. If chkdsk didn't help, I would look into Hard Drive Regenerator or another similar program which does a more thorough job than chkdsk.

If you can't get the drive recognized in Windows or a pre-install environment like Bart's PE when it is attached to your computer directly (and after double checking the jumpers to make sure they are set correctly), then there really isn't anything else to do...'cept bring it to Best Buy lol...

Hope that helps.