[j8ck8ll]

I have a very frustrating problem and hope someone can shed some light on the situation for me.

I purchased a Maxtor Basics 500GB external Hard Drive STM305003EHD301-RK a while back and after having some niggling issues with it for the first couple of weeks it had been working perfectly, no problems at all. I had formatted it and the drive was recognised everytime it was plugged in. I'm running it on my Acer T650, P4, Win XP Media Centre Edition SP3.

This weekend I was visiting some family and wanted to take my drive with me so we could watch some films and listen to some music etc. Nothing out of the ordinary.

So the drive would have been unplugged for the duration of the journey. (It is not the first time the drive has been unplugged.) It was wrapped in a towel and in my rucsack so it was protected from knocks/impact etc.

After getting to our destination I unwrapped it and immediately plugged it in ready to go. The green light came on as usual. After plugging it in to my brother in-law's laptop (he was running Vista) it loaded up, only to say that we needed admin access rights when trying to go into the music folder?!?!

Ok, so we tried the movies folder. It let us in but wouldn't play any of the movies! But it let us copy one of them over to his laptop which then played perfectly.

After removing it safely I thought it might be an XP/Vista compatability problem and tried it on the home desktop they had.

This time, nothing happened at all. No green light on, no nothing. I heard the hard drive spin for about 5 seconds then stop completely. It has been the same way ever since.

I have been all over the net trying to see if someone else has experienced anything similar but found nothing. I just wanted to cover all angles before I contact their support line in America or see if I can hardwire the drive into my own desktop.

I really cannot afford to lose the 450GB+ of data on the drive! I really hope this is a simple power issue with the AC adaptor or something!

Many thanks in advance if anyone can help me!