I just got a Maxtor OneTouch4 Mini 250GB external HDD from my friend. It's worked fine for as long as either of us know, but it's suddenly not accessible. Everything seems to be working fine, but it simply won't show up on Windows; it's contently sitting in the fat dumb and happy state. Both ends of the USB Y-cable are plugged in, the disk spins up, the access light comes on and stays solid, both Windows XP and Vista recognize a new device and succesfully install it, and the drive shows up fully working in both device manager and the Microsoft USB device viewer utility. But I don't get a dialog asking me what to do with the drive and when I go to My Computer the drive is not listed.
I've already tried unplugging/replugging, restarting the computer, disable/enable and update driver via device manager, safely remove device, and checking for drivers on the Maxtor site (which has no drivers or useful information about the problem). This has all been done on two Vista and one XP machine with consistent behavior among all three, so whatever the problem is, I assume it's with the drive itself. The disk spins up with no scraping or crunching of platters, and the LED doesn't blink to indicate a physical problem, plus I've read two or three threads describing the same problem but I can't find any relevant information on how to fix this. By all indications the drive works, I simply can't get to it. Any ideas on how to go about fixing this? Thanks in advance.