External HD (Enclosure) suddenly not functioning... help, this is my life.

[LoXish]

Okay, here's the skibby. I run two machines, a desktop and a laptop,both running XP Professional. I have a 100 gig PATA Maxtor drive in an Adaptec External HD Enclosure to make it an external USB 2.0 HD.

I have about 90 gigs of stuff on the external, and it's always plugged into one of the computers. The external was plugged into my desktop and I was listening to an MP3 off of it when all of a sudden, it stopped playing. Winamp skipped through the entire playlist as though it couldn't locate the files. I checked My Computer and the HD wasn't there anymore.

There's a twist though. At work we just got the new Geek Squad jump drives in, they're equipped with this new U3 platform. It's a virtual enviroment that allows you to run full software like Skype and Trillian from your jumpdrive. It creates a virtual drive to work off of... I havent' quite pieced it all together, but here's the website for the technology: http://www.u3.com/

The drive autoruns this platform when you plug it in, I plugged it in and I believe it had something to do with the drive not working.

I unplugged the external and plugged it back in. The sounds indicating that a USB device had been plugged in sounded and the "safely remove hardware" indicator appeared, but no autoplay or "what would you like to do" dialogue appeared. I checked My Computer again and it wasn't there. Upon opening the safely remove dialogue, it showed the USB mass storage device and the Maxtor HD under it... but not any of the other usually listed items.

I tried it on my laptop, same thing. I yanked the HD and tossed it in my Desktop and it reads just fine, although it doesn't have a recognizable file format, so I couldn't retrieve any of the data, and in order to do so I'd have to format it and I can't lose this data. I'm going to go to work and try to use some of the externals we have there in a bit... any ideas until then?

[bailey]

removing the usb drive with first click on the its safe to remove device to eject it can cause the file format to get distroyed on the drive. or what ever you useing in the usb port.

[LoXish]

After pouring over your incoherent post trying to decipher what it is you were saying, I've decided that that's not what happened. Nothing was removed. The drive disappeared while plugged in, it wasn't touched.