External USB HDD Error
I got an external Usb harddisk around 6 months ago for my birthday, its a Maxtor 40Gig that's been installed into a slim USB 2.0 casing. Been using it ever since and had no errors whatsoever with it. Today when I decided to watch the Adevnt children trailer that was stored on it, I was unzipping it when a disc read error popped up. It roughle read, from what I can remember -
I/O device read error /device/Harddisk1/.... [cant remember the rest]
I promptly restarted then at the WinXP login screen, it took around 5 times as longer to show me the list of current user (it was stuck at "Windows is starting up..."). And it also popped up a notice with the above error and the buttons "Cancel" "Try Again" "Continue". I clicked continue and once I logged in, Windows was responding really, really slowly (i have 256mb RAM). Once I wen to My Computer, the window froze and a "Not Responding" sign appeared. I thought ofswitching of my second HDD since the error message had said "Harddisk1" and the My Computer window started responding, however the two partitions on my external drive (H and I) could be seen but not accessed. I googled the error message and came up with a solution of uninstalling USB and letting WinXP redetect it and reinstall it. To cut a long story short, this happened, but the error message dissapeared. The only thing is that nothing else had changed and I still couldn't access H:/ and I:/ . I connected up the HDD to my old Win98 computer which uses USB1.1 and surprisingly it worked, I could access my files. However I couldn't get those files to my current comp since my old comp doesn't have a CD-R/RW.
Anyone know what the problem is or can suggest a solution for this. If this cant be solved, I might have to reformat Windows for the 2nd time and see if atleast that works. I'm going to try a System Restore know and see if that helps...
BTW sorry for my long post
EDIT - Would installing the drive internally help? If so could anyone povide some tutorials? [NOTE - this is as a last resort, that I'd do if nothing else works]
