Question Maxtor external hard drive suddenly not showing up ?

[Topsycat]

I'm in a complete stress! My Maxtor external HD has been working fine but now doesn't show up on my laptop. It's a plug in to the wall type that fires up ok and has a green light on the front but nothing more than this. I have tried it on other laptops too ....and nothing. I have also tried a different connecting cable but again...nothing.
Any help would be very gratefully received as my knowledge is limited.
Thank you everyone.

 

[Darkbreeze]

You do realize that hard drive failure is extremely common, right? So, you have the data on this drive backed up to some other location like another drive, optical disks or a cloud backup, right? Because if you don't, this is probably going to become an extremely painful learning experience for you.

And because, if you DID, you would not be at all stressed aside from the obvious need to most probably replace the drive with another one in order to continue having somewhere to back things up to.

Does the drive make any sort of noises when you power it on or plug it in? Because the light on the front is primarily to verify that power is getting to the enclosure, and doesn't necessarily have much to do with the drive itself. It could be an enclosure failure OR a drive failure.

 

[Topsycat]

Thank you for coming back to me. Most of the stuff is backed up, yes, but not all.......I have definitely learned a lesson.
The drive makes a normal noise and sounds like it is working and has a gentle vibration as it always has done.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Then it sounds like there's a good chance that it might only be that there's a problem with the enclosure hardware. I don't know about your particular drive but a lot of these external drives you can actually disassemble the enclosure, remove the drive and either connect it directly to your motherboard like any other internal drive OR purchase another enclosure and install it in that. You would need to do some research to find out if your model is one where the drive can be removed or if it's not possible with that model because of the manner in which it's connected to the enclosure hardware.

 

[Topsycat]

Thank you so much! You've given me hope 🙏.

 

[Darkbreeze]

If you give me the exact model of the external drive I can take a look later this evening when I get home to see if it's one that you can remove the drive on.

 

[Topsycat]

Maxtor Basics Desktop Storage
500GB
PN:9NZ2A4-500
SN:2HBEW21Z

 

[Darkbreeze]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jErT-beUHg

Yours is the "Desktop storage" rather than the "Personal storage", but the process should be the same even though I believe your model may have a 3.5" drive inside rather than a 2.5" as seen on that video. You might still want to do a little more investigation to be sure yours is able to be recovered this way but I'm tentatively confident of the probability that it is. I am not 100% sure though so please try to verify before attempting to disassemble.

 

[Topsycat]

That's such a great help. Thank you so much!

 

[Darkbreeze]

Sure thing. Anytime.

 

[fzabkar]

I think this is it (model number STM305003EHD301):

https://www.subito.it/informatica/hard-disk-esterno-maxtor-500-gb-monza-528188809.htm

https://images.sbito.it/api/v1/sbt-...43d-c05a64f0f146?rule=gallery-desktop-1x-auto (rear label)

https://www.seagate.com/content/dam...documentation/data_sheets/maxtor_jade_3_5.pdf (datasheet)

It's definitely a 3.5" model.