Hi,
I had an issue two days ago with 120 Go maxtor hard drive.
It was may be even worst than for you because it made all the system much slower, 15 minutes to start xp and 5 minutes of system freeze when trying to access the drive...
The drive was recognize in the bios but in windows explorer by clicking on it, there was some error messages : I/O error or disk not formated
I didn't found anyone in computer stores able to help me to get back my data.
But finaly going on maxtor website I found the solution : they offer a software that you can use to make a bootable floppy disk. This will allow you to check your maxtor hard drive and repair it if possible. For me it worked fine, the tool found some issues repaired them and everything went back to what it was before. The important point is that I didn't loose my data. You could try this it might solve your problem
The utility is called powerMax , here is the link for the download :
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22
But maxtor hard drive are not always having issues I still have an old 12 Go maxtor drive and it always work perfectly
