PCTech Forums

The problem is I have a Maxtor Diamond 8 Plus that I was trying to use as a spare external drive via a USB hookup, when I hook this up to my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5150 running Windows XP SP3, the laptop does recognize that the hard drive is plugged as it gives me the “USB mass storage device” is plugged in and I have the little safe to pull icon in the system tray. However it does not show up in the My Documents, My Computer or in Disk Management. It does show up in the Device Manager under Disk Drive and under Universal Serial Bus Controller “Location 0 (USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge)” though... I also tried this on my desktop PC and had the same issue it shows up only under Device manager but nowhere else. I have a feeling the drive has a bad boot sector or maybe faulty as it was a factory refurbished item but I just don’t know how to verify if it is the drive or a Windows issue.

One note is I originally got this drive to load Windows XP on my desktop but due to misinformation from a rep of the make of the PC, that models board has issues with this specific drive it seems, it would not load so I got a brand that would work and thought I would keep the Maxtor for a external drive to the laptop. Any help will much appreciated.

Hi webwork,

You said it show up in the Device Manager under Disk Drive.
Double click the drive when in Device Manager check to make sure "Device Usage" is enabled on the General tab.
Then click on the volume tab and click the populate button, does it give you a drive letter or anything?
Also click on the drivers tab and click on Update Drivers.

Thanks for response Gecko,

I started to try your suggestion this morning and the drive loaded with the labeling in Device Manager as
"Maxtor N40P USB Device"
....well that was a strange listing for this Maxtor Diamondmax 8 Plus.....and not as it has had while I was trying to get this to work so I did a little digging on that listing and found this is a Firmware or maybe other physical problem with the drive. Funny but one of the sites I found that does data recovery had listed most all the symptoms I have had with this drive.
The site is http://datacent.com/datarecovery/hdd/ma ... P+NAR6253Z but there were some others that had listed the same stuff about this drive.

Me thinkst me got a bad drive from de getgo. Anyway, there is no data on this and it has never had anything put on it so I'm only out the $ for the HDD.

Thanks for giving this a go, I wish this would have listed the N40P thing to start out with....must be my constant attempts to fix this brought the listing out to the open.