I did that, in fact I think formatting it remedied the out-of-alignment sectors issue-but won't put anything irreplaceable on it for awhile.

Sorry this post was so far OT but hard to find specific answers on the EZQuest FAQ site.

You shouldn't need a fire extinguisher, but, now that you know all external firewires are simply internal HD's enclosed in an external case, you also know that the problem you were having with the drive has to do with the external enclosure - its interface - what some external drive manufacturers call the tail piece and not the hard drive, itself.

I would contact the manufacturer again and explain the problem again, given your new level of knowledge. There might be something they can do for you on the phone . . . or they may agree to ship you a new enclosure or perhaps replace the entire drive, enclosure and all.

Also, be aware that there remain issues with Windows and external fire wire drives - some that MS may acknowledge as "known issues" and others that they have, as yet, failed to "admit."

I own six external drives - three ADS enclosures and three Maxtor drives/enclosures, and have experienced a similar set of problems in using them with two different systems (a 900 mHz Compaq and a new 3.0 gHz shuttle, both running XP Pro - problems are the same on both systems).

Occasionally, one of the Maxtors acts up and refuses to enumerate (some call it "mount" . . . in short, WinXPPro, my os, will not recognize the drive). Sometimes I can overcome the problem by using that little green arrow icon that shows in the task bar whenever you are running firewire components to dismount all firewire drives. I then unplug them, and mount them one at a time - sometimes in a different order. Often that will solve the problem.

When it doesn't solve the problem, I usually start swapping drives from other enclosures into the malfunctioning one - that almost always solves the problem, although, for the life of me, I cannot explain why.

I do know that a phone tech rep from Maxtor once told me that the problem with their enclosures was the tailpiece. That was back when I was relatively new to these devices and felt it taboo to open the Maxtor enclosures. Since then, like you, I have discovered how simple they are to open/close, and I regularly swap drives into and out of them.

I still have and rely on the enclosure that gave me a problem; so, I tend to believe the problem isn't the Maxtor enclosure, but Windows, itself.

For WinXP sp1, MS issued a patch that completely solved all my firewire issues. That patch is useless with sp2, and some of the issues with my firewires have returned, namely - "delayed read/write" error messages of doom stating that the data on the drive is no longer accessible. Don't believe those messages - just reboot your computer and remount the drive.

On another occasion, where some error caused my computer to hang during actual transfer of data to or from the drive, the drive did become inaccessible to XP. In those instances, XP would report that the drive needed to be formatted. In reality, I found that only that portion of the drive (sorry, I'm cannot recall the term) that XP uses to identify it was corrupted. I used a program I downloaded from the Internet to save the data. The name of the program was "getdatabacknow".

That little program was invaluable to me, as the data included several hours of tedious live recording that I had not yet backed-up. Getdatabacknow was able to display all the data files on the drive, and allowed me to copy them to other drives before I eventually reformatted the drive so that XP could use it again.

The above scenario has occurred only once in my experience with these external drives. You may hear plenty of disparaging remarks about firewire drives, but, for me, they are a convenient and reliable means of expanding storage space. Except for the near miss I discussed above, I have yet to experience loss of important data in using these drives, and consider their use no more risky than the use of an internal drive which, too, could "fail" if there were some sort of interruption during the actual exchange of data.

For me, the important key is not to accept as true many of the error messages that XP throws up on the screen at times - "delayed write" errors being the most common of the message I run into. I've had XP "drop" my firewire drives, one at a time by throwing up those "delayed write" messages. Once it reports that a delayed write error has occurred on drive $E (or something similar), then, drive E will no longer be accessible during that Windows session. To get back into E, you have to reboot the machine. Usually, that does the trick.

I have also found that, on my system, maintaining the same firewire configuration between sessions reduces problems with system recognition of my drives. If I power down my system, then, remove one or more drives, booting up takes forever, and some of the external drives may not be recognized. Then, I have to resort to dismounting all and hooking them up one at a time. I don't know why this should be, but it is definitely a windows problem.

Sorry I have rattled on so, but that's what I know about the use of firewire on my systems. Good luck.

Caruso

<Portion of the drive that XP uses to identify it was corrupted--reformat.>

<Ignore data loss messages in XP.>

<Disconnect and re-mount multiple drives in the desired order.>

Many thanks for the reality check DelCallo (I'm both editor3333 and vitalforce--gotta fix that), I had eventually come to the same conclusions and practices myself! Good to hear that another user gets the same results with the same methods. The big issue I was exploring was the idea that the hard drive itself isn't failing--only the outside circuitry/software.

Interesting...
I too have been having problems with my Maxtor drive reporting that file $etc has failed to write to the drive and that this data is lost.

Also, my drive has started ticking from time to time like an old car indicator. Have you had this symptom as well and should I be worried/looking to change my drive which is still under warranty?

After having a very expensive Lacie external drive die just after warrantee expiration, I will never again pay for an external drive.

Instead I turned to enclosures. I feel they are more reliable because they use less propreitary hardware/software. Some might argue they use the similiar technology. However, in the Lacie they were using two raid 0 drives with no fan--gee wonder why they failed...

So far I'm having good luck with a Venus Ds3 enclosure, (has large fan) with a Matrox hard drive. Do note, two Matrox drives were in the Lacie, I've read Matrox get hotter than other brands.

The Venus Ds3 has been great and cheap, but it uses mostly plastic parts, so get a few. I wouldn't suggest continuosly swapping drives out of one do too the stress on the plastic.

Its too bad Lacie used to have a reputation for their quality, after mine died I did a search an found many forums dedictated to how their Lacie external drive products died.

I've had 2 matrox external drives die on me right after their (short!!) 1 year warranty is up ... no more maxtor!

I'm now using 300-400 gig seagate drives.

ken