Yes I believe this is cause by leaving the cable plugged in when taking it on trips. I've had exactly the same problem as the OP, I think the USB connector may have worn out so I'm going to crack the case open. Its a USB Hard drive, I am talking about taking the hard drive out of the plastic case but thanks for your reply. If it's the Molex connector, rectangular with four rather large pins and located at the righthand side of the rear of the drive, it's PATA, otherwise it's SATA. The easy way to tell whether a drive is PATA or SATA is to examine its power connector. I am pretty Sure I do not have one on my motherboard, I have old ones that do laying around but finding all the parts to assemble a computer would be hard as I just moved. Instead, they simply replace the drive with a new one.ĮDIT: This is based on more than 20 years' experience with a major drive manufacturer which is now part of Seagate.Īre you sure you do not have one legacy PATA port? Most motherboards keep one for the CD or just to have one.

Repair can only be done by the manufacturer - and they don't do it. Once that seal is broken, the heads WILL crash within a very few seconds of applying power. The case then gets an airtight seal to keep out any contamination. They must be assembled in clean rooms where no dust particles large enough to get between the head and the surface can exist.

All hard drives relay on 'flying' heads, which fly only a few millionths of an inch above the disk surface. Opening the drive case will destroy the drive.

I would greatly appreciate any help you could give me.Any1 got experience in repairing these or know if the hard drive is SATA?The easy way to tell whether a drive is PATA or SATA is to examine its power connector. I tried using the hard drive on a desktop computer with the same results. Within the folders that worked correctly directories would again be correct, but when i tried to copy their files to my laptop nothing happened. Some folders were listed as 'empty' and when i clicked on them the error message 'The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable' popped up. I could open the drive and all of the primary folders were present but only certain folders were actually functioning. It even recognized that 165/279 GB were being used. After unplugging/rebooting/etc a few times the drive was correctly recognized as the E: Drive. I did not format the drive to prevent data loss. The drive would appear in the 'My computer' section of my laptop but the drive was labeled 'RAW' and when i clicked on it I was given the message that it needed to be formatted before it could be used. Today it stopped recognizing data within the hard drive.

I own a Maxtor 3200 external hard drive which has worked well until recently.

Open maxtor personal storage 3200