Major Problem With External Hard Drive

When i connect my External Hard Drive, one of two things happen.

1) the red light comes on at the front and stays on, making the computer basically stop, or
2) nothing happens at all, device manager recognises that it is there, and that it is working, driver is installed etc, but when i go into my computer, it is not there, even after refreshing.

i really need the save the hard drive, and would relaly prefer not have to reformat it, seeing as there are over 2000 songs and about 10,000 pictures on it, all of which cannot be replaced.....

please would someone help

cheers

Olly

*Im running XP and the hard drive is a maxtor 6

Much more info is needed to sort this out:

- Did this external drive ever work ? How long have you been using this external drive ?

- Did you assemble this drive from an external case and a hard drive or did you buy it assembled ?

- How did your files get on the drive ? Was the disk drive external or internal at the time ?

- Did you ever format the drive while it was externally connected ?

- Did the drive suddenly stop working or was there intermittent failures ?

- Does the USB port still work ? Have you plugged another USB device into to verify this ?

- Have you plugged the drive into another USB port ? What happens ?

--------------------------------------------
I suggest that you immediately back up your files by disassembling the external drive to extract the bare drive. You should be able to install the disk drive temporarily as a slave drive internally to a desktop computer on the same cable as the primary hard disk. You will probably have to change the jumper configuration from master to slave. There should be a diagram on the top of the drive to show you how.

-Yes the drive worked from the day i had it, about 2 years....
-I assembled it.
-Been used as a secondary drive for photos and music, in constant use, loaded to by a USB cable.
-No
-Suddenly Stopped
-The plug still works, tried both to A) try other devices on that port, and try the drive on other ports.
-See above

-Tried to back things up, but whenever i plug the USB cable in, the computer freezes, and whatever i press or click on, nothing happens, until the drive is unplugged, then it does all the things i asked it to.

OK, to figure out whether it's the case or the drive that is fried try attaching the bare drive internally to a desktop. Change the jumper setup if necessary. It should be jumpered to master so it probably easiest to use the optical drive cable to plug into it.

Whichever one is bad can't be fixed. Hope that it's the case.

olly_cavner:

Is the red light you referred to in your first post on the drive enclosure? If so does the manual that came with the enclosure tell you what the red light means?