Hard Drive is recognize but cannot open, I/O device error

Hey guys,

This is my first post in this forum and I hate for it to be for help but I am at my wits end.

I have a Maxtor 6 Y080 External Hard Drive, 80 GB.

I have it hooked up to my Dell Dimension 5150, XP, SP 2, 3.06 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, Geforce 5500 graphics.

So, I've had the HD for the past year and it has worked wonders. I back up all my work to it as well as my music, videos and pictures.

For the past week, it has been saying I/O device error. I've tried to run CHKDSK/f and CHKDSK/r to no avail. I've tried to hook it up to other computers and it still won't work.

The problem is that it shows up in my computer and disk manager but I cannot access it.

So, for instance, I will go to my computer, see 2 Hard drives, my C and my F (external). I will try to open the F and it will hang. I have to bring up the task manager to close out my computer as it is not responding.

So, any help...suggestions...comments. Thanks a ton.

That sounds like your hard disk either died or is on the way to die. Is it making any noises ? Do u hear any beeps when booting up your computer with your external hard drive connected to your pc ? Do you see disk failure message or error message during bootup ? I suggest you download PowerMax from Maxtor's website and do a diagnostic on this hard drive. It should tell you if your hard drive is failing or not. Here's a link to download the tool

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto ... nloadID=22

Hope it helps.

i am having the same exact problem with the same maxtor 250 gig one touch external hd. I reformatted windows and that didnt help either... I have my entire music collection and all my pictures on here. Did you ever find a solution to this problem. The last thing I remembered doing was defraging it and it worked fine. I can't afford to lose these files. Also When I plug it into my xbox 360 via USB i can listen to music and view pics just fine.

I have the same exact problem !

I/O device Error !

is there any solution ? .. I just bought this hard drive a couple of weeks ago, 160gb Moving Star External ... I have a whole lot of Music/Videos on it, is there anyway to possibly grab the information off of it, I am hoping it is not broken, but if it is, I need that stuff off of it.......Where should I bring the drive to get it fixed or possibly grab the info off of it ?

Thanks,
-r055t

I have recently had this problem with a Maxtor SATA hard drive, running on XP, it severely slowed down the OS (40mins to start up) and once started would recognise the HDD, but not the size or how much was used. Also would cause errors if I tried to access disk management.

I'm posting here today as I found this post while looking for an answer - the reason my HDD failed was it was too full/slightly faulty, and this was causing errors. I used Knoppix to access the drive and copy the files to another HDD. Its extremely useful as it runs from CD and so doesn't mess with your files in any way.

I then had the files backed up but as XP couldn't recognise it to boot/install to, and Knoopix won't play nicely with NTFS I was considering throwing the drive away, although have since found that Vista will repair the drive on boot, and so I can format if I wish