External Hard Drive I/O Error

[LoganM]

I have a brand new Maxtor external USB 250 GB hard drive. It worked fine until two weeks ago. I think it is now upto 70% full. I turned off my computer for the whole night and then later on turned it on in the morning and the drive was no longer accessible. I get 2 different I/O error each time I try to look into the drive. Does anyone know what this error is all about and how to fix it?

[Howitzer]

Can you see the drive Disk Management? To check this go to Desktop, right click on My Computer and select Manage. Under Storage, click "Disk Management" from the tree on the left. Check if the drive is shown here. If it is there then delete the partition and recreate it. Once you get it, perform full format and not the quick one. Remember to format it in NTFS format. If it isn't working then that certainly indicates that the drive is faulty.

[singhnetserferX]

right click on my computer->manage->diskmanagement.look there if your hdd is shown in raw format.and try to checkdisk utility on that disk.if can't acces the disk than check bios settings and reinstall the drive or reassign the drive letter to hdd.if it doesn't work than use dm (win 98 disk manager) to perform a full format to that hdd. if u still got problem then replace it , it is faulty.

[deoWo]

Since how long you have been using this Maxtor hard drive? Was it brought recently or it has been in operational from a long time, may be few years? Perform a chkdsk on the hard drive and see if that helps. It has been seen on some drives containing music and digital camera images stored on it.Also run a virus scan on that drive.

[Fabian]

The error clearly indicates that it is related to Input/output. It involves how data enters and extracts from the computer. This error appears when the processor is unable to communicate with your external drive. Before coming to the conclusion, restart your computer while the drive is connected and see if the computer can detect this new drive during the reboot. If it is unrecognized, then that clearly indicates your system is infected.