How to Solve: Maxtor External Drive Not Working in Windows 11/10/8/7

Overview of “Maxtor External drive not working” issue

Maxtor External drive not working

Hi, I have an external Maxtor 500 GB HDD is not working any more, I tried to reconnect it to different wires without any luck. Can you help me solve this problem?

- Question from Tom's hardware

You may have met a problem the users mentioned in different forums, like “Maxtor external drive not working”, “Maxtor USB/hard drive can’t be detected by computer” and “USB flash drive not showing up.

Here are some causes of this kind of problem; you can find a method from this post according to these causes.

● Connect with wrong cable, or poor contact
● USB port not working under-saving mode
● Device driver is outdated.
● The drive becomes a raw drive or does not have a recognized file system.
● Bad sector on the external drive

How to fix “Maxtor external drive not working”?

Maxtor is connected via USB cable, before trying the following methods, you can try to reconnect the external drive through another USB cable and port to see if it is caused by wrong cable or poor connection. If the problem is still there, try the following solutions.

• Method 1. Disable USB power-saving mode

• Method 2. Upgrade device driver

• Method 3. Check error using CHKDSK utility

• Method 4. Rebuild the MBR of the Maxtor external drive

• Method 5. Format the external drive to correct file system

Method 1. Disable USB power-saving mode

Windows enables the USB power saving mode by default. Saving mode can save power by turning off the USB port and use it intermittently. However, sometimes, USB will not turn on successfully when you plug in an external hard drive. Then you need to disable the USB power save mode.

Step 1. Click on the “Start” button and select “Device Manager” or search it with Search Box to open Device Manager.

Step 2. Expand “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” and double-click “USB Root Hub”.

Step 3. Under the “Power Management” and disable “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save mode”, and click “OK”.

Method 2. Update device driver

If device driver is outdated or incorrect, an external hard drive can’t be detected by computer. You can try to update the driver to check whether the problem is solved.

1. Open Device Manager as Method 1 instructs.

2. Expand Disk Drives and right-click the driver and click “update driver software”.

3. You need to choose the way of updating driver. The first option allows Windows to find the latest driver to update on the internet. If you have downloaded the latest driver, choose the second option.

Then, open the Maxtor hard drive and see if the problem gets fixed.

Method 3. Check error using CHKDSK utility

CHKDSK is a repairing tool frequently used to check and corrects errors by many users when encountering issue about hard drive.

Here we introduce two ways of launching the CHKDSK tool.

● Launch CHKDSK via Command Prompt

Step 1. Press “Win + R” and type“cmd” and press Enter.

Step 2. Type “chkdsk [drive letter]: /f /r /x” on the Command Prompt window, and press Enter, this command will check errors and restore readable data as much as possible.

● Open CHKDSK with the best free repairing software

Maybe, the Command Prompt makes you confused, and it probably fails to launch and prompt you “Access Denied as you do not have sufficient privileges”.

Then, you can use the hard drive repairing software-AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It is a free repairing tool and it has great features to make it all convenient. It is compatible with most Windows operation systems, like Windows 10/8/7, Windows XP, Windows Vista. Besides, its intuitive interface makes CHKDSK fixing much simpler, and minimalize operation risks.

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click Maxtor external drive on the main interface, and click “Advanced”> “Check Partition”. 

Step 2. We choose the “Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe”. You can also choose other options or just run them one by one, and click “OK”.

Step 3. Then wait for the check to be completed, and click “OK”.

Method 4. Rebuild the MBR of Maxtor external drive

Master Boot Record (MBR) is a special type of boot sector to store booting information at the beginning of a storage device. If the MBR is damaged, a Maxtor external drive would be not working or not showing up. Also, you can rebuild MBR with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, Right-click the Maxtor drive, and choose “Rebuild MBR”. 

Step 2. Choose the OS of your computer, and click “OK”.

Step 3. In the main interface, click “Apply” and view the Pending Operations and click “Proceed”.

Method 5. Format the external drive to correct file system

If your Maxtor external hard drive/USB is detected but not accessible because it does not contain a recognized file system, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant to format it to a compatible file system.

✍Attention: Format will delete all data and files on the drive, please backup the external hard drive before formatting.

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, and right-click the Maxtor external drive and choose “Format Partition”. 

Step 2. Then, choose a proper file system from drop-down menu. And click on “OK”.

Step 3. Go back to the main interface and click “Apply” > “Proceed” to start formatting.

After the formatting operation, its file system will be changed.

Conclusion

I hope the 5 methods can help solve the “Maxtor external drive not working” issue. They can also apply to other hard drives having similar problems, Toshiba, Seagate, WD, Samsung, and so on.

And if you upgrade it to Professional Edition, which provides more advanced features, including convert system disk between MBR and GPT, extending system partition, and write random data to hard drive to wipe a hard drive completely.