My iMac won't find my Maxtor External HD

Hi.

I have an iMac with a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 processor (just a little over a year old) and I have been using a Maxtor One Touch II 200 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (E01E200) that I bought years ago to back up files and such.

Recently, and for no apparent reason that I am aware of, the Maxtor HD no longer shows up on my desktop nor have I been able to locate it on the disk utility. I even followed a similar thread I found here on Mac Forums that suggested running a script, and that had no result either.

I have tried plugging it into another Mac and it also does not show up.

Any idea what's going on and how I can resolve this? Any help would be greatly appreciated considering the files stored on the HD are very important to me.

Thanks

It's time to replace the drive. Either the drive electronics have failed or the drive is not spinning up. A Maxtor drive is ancient history... I have a few of them laying around also.

chscag said:

It's time to replace the drive. Either the drive electronics have failed or the drive is not spinning up. A Maxtor drive is ancient history... I have a few of them laying around also.

Click to expand...

Darn! Is there no way to rescue the files then?

departmentm said:

Darn! Is there no way to rescue the files then?

Click to expand...

Sometimes hard drives crash all of a sudden...without any warning. If this is what happened...then recovering files is pretty much impossible...because sometimes it's the read/write heads in the HD that have failed.

- Nick