This is the drive described elsewhere on the Forum under the OneTouch Four laments, because my symptoms were the same.
All available troubleshooting has been done for this drive per the Seagate website.
After becoming inaccessible for several days, by simply "going solid" and after suffering the data loss (this was a transitional backup repository during a period when other Maxtor 1T3 drives had failed and backups were inthe process of being juggled), I was sitting at my data center desk with head in hands trying to get up the will power & interest to yet again resurrect one of these (non-)blinking drives.
In light of the very helpful suggestion that these drives are not supported under Windows Server 2003, I've had the thing again connected to one Win XP Pro workstation or another for the last several days, via FW800, FW400, USB2.0, to no avail. Until an hour ago, that is!
After 6 hours' connection via USB 2.0, the laptop suddenly discovered new hardware! Read for a while. Then displayed (most of) the various directories down to the Retrospect backup set files. The listing was also able to display Properties > Security for the individual files and folders.
Naturally I tried to copy them off to another destination, but they weren't really there. I succeeded in getting the drive to display all the directories and files and get screen shots of the listings so I have a good idea of what was lost. Fortunately a good number had already been copied to a server before the failure, so I only lost 700GB instead of the 1,300GB that had been on the drive.
The drive was in default config.
(1) However, one of the Delayed Write Failed errors I captured in a screen shot, refers to the $MFTmirr file.
(2) Stellar Information Systems' Stellar SMART detected the drive briefly. (3) Passmark's BurninTest also briefly detected the drive.
(3) SeaTools may have detected the drive because it showed a USB/1394 section on its diagnostics, but trying any test yielded Drive Status of "Test Unavailable."
(4) Norton Ghost 12.0 detected the drive with a blue question mark and reported it had been "backed up." None of the utilities could process the drive. After the OneTouch button ceased blinking the drive was invisibly inaccessible again. The rest of the files remain lost.
Error messages are available via screen shots for comparison, on request. I'm still looking for good low-level disk utilities that can discover a drive which otherwise appears dead.
