I purchased two Maxtor OneTouch II 300Gb External Hard Drives. Both installed fine. I formatted them with a single NTFS 286Gb partition on my Dell 4550 system running Windows XP Pro, fully patched to SP2. I connected the drives with USB 2.0 and Firewire. A month ago the USB drive had a File Save problem. When I double clicked on the drive in My Computer the drive wasn't available. I checked Drive Manager and the single partition was in something called RAW format. I haven't been able to recover it, even with Norton. My other Maxtor Drive attached via Firewire died last night. This time my desktop display a write error and when I pulled up Partition Magic 8.0 the drive partition displayed as unformatted. I don't want to reformat my partitions and lose the data. I have three other Maxtor External Drives that have worked fine for several years. This is only on my 300Gb Maxtor OneTouch II drives, the rest I have never had a problem. No I didn't do anything stupid with the drives and they haven't been disconnected or unplugged for weeks. I use both Zone Alarm and Norton for firewall protection and run a weekly virus scan with Norton. This problem seem restricted to Maxtor OneTouch II External Drives. Anyone experienced this before or have any ideas about how to recover my data?
I would suggest going on Maxtor's website and look for a possible low level format utility they might offer for their HDD's if nothing else works. I would also check to see if tht HDD's would work in your case instead of going through the external enclosure, just to make sure they are not the problem as well.
