[badsam]

Hello, I just bought an external hard drive (Maxtor One Touch 4Mini 120 GB). I first connected it to my pc, installed the software which was present on the drive, it worked fine. 2nd time i was trying to connect the drive, An error was displayed: "USB device Not Recognized- one of the usb devices has malfunctioned....". Tried to connect it to another port, reinstall usb driver, enable-disable, Bios update, but that was no good, except it worked fine on my labtop (XP pro) as the PC (XP Pro SP2). I formatted C and re-installed windows, but still it wasn't recognized. The drive is not detected in Device Manager as well. I don't know what's wrong. Help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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badsam,

If you look at the other similar posts on this site - you're NOT alone with this Maxtor external USB drive issue. My only regret is that you went through ALL of the trouble of reformatting your PC and re-installing Windows. My gut tells me that this was probably NOT necessary. Based on all of the posts on this site, these external Maxtor drives seemed to be plagued with the similar problems.

Just to confirm the problem is with the external Maxtor drive and NOT with the USB hardware on your PC - I would ask you to try 2 things if possible:

1) Try connecting this drive to a DIFFERENT PC and see if it is recognized and you're able to acess it.

2) Are you able to sucessfully user OTHER USB devices on your PC where the Maxtor drive is NOT working (i.e. flash drives, mice, etc.)?

If the answer to 1 is NO and the answer to 2 is YES, than everything pointes to your Maxtor drive being defective/faulty. If this is the case, I would replace it.

Hope this helps.

- John

[John Hook]

badsam,

If you look at the other similar posts on this site - you're NOT alone with this Maxtor external USB drive issue. My only regret is that you went through ALL of the trouble of reformatting your PC and re-installing Windows. My gut tells me that this was probably NOT necessary. Based on all of the posts on this site, these external Maxtor drives seemed to be plagued with the similar problems.

Just to confirm the problem is with the external Maxtor drive and NOT with the USB hardware on your PC - I would ask you to try 2 things if possible:

1) Try connecting this drive to a DIFFERENT PC and see if it is recognized and you're able to acess it.

2) Are you able to sucessfully user OTHER USB devices on your PC where the Maxtor drive is NOT working (i.e. flash drives, mice, etc.)?

If the answer to 1 is NO and the answer to 2 is YES, than everything pointes to your Maxtor drive being defective/faulty. If this is the case, I would replace it.

Hope this helps.

- John

[badsam]

well, the problem is, the answer to both questions is yes!

[badsam]

Man, obviously the problem is the usb ports..I can no longer connect my ipod! this just happened now, the printer still works though. What do I do?

[badsam]

Here's my final conclusion: The usb ports doesn't recognize any storage devices: external hard drive, ipod, flash drive, mp3 player....etc while DOES recognize usb devices like: printer, scanner, usb modem, mobile phone...I don't know if that makes any sense?

Edited by badsam, 12 April 2008 - 08:33 AM.

[John Hook]

badsam,

What is the MAKE & MODEL of your PC. I ask because if it's based on an Intel Chipset - my recommendation would be to REMOVE ALL USB devices, install the appropriate Intel Chipset drivers and let Windows re-detect and re-install all of the USB drivers. Your problem is CLEARLY not hardware related. It seems as if you installed some USB Mass Storage drive that is NOT compatible with your hardware and/or the version of Windows you're running. Reply with this information and I think I can solve your problem.

- John

[badsam]

John, thanks for the replies.. I just got the problem solved by removing the power cord for about 30 minutes and restarted the PC..worked like magic