Other External products

[plod2001]

Hi, I have a problem with a Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus Drive 1TB, 
PN 9NT3A8-500 

I bought it in march 2009. It has been working fine until last week, when it did not mount. When the power is plugged in, the drive spins up, but does not mount on the desktop and the white light flashes repeatedly on the front of the drive. I use a FW400 cable (I have tested the drive with different cables and power supplies, but I always get the same result).

I've trawled through the various posts, and it is looking like the drive has failed. Any ideas?

Cheers 

I'm using MacOS by the way.

[boktors]

Last night I was backing up some digital music collection on my Maxtor One Touch 4. Today, the light is just blinking and the drive won't mount.  What's the problem?  It's been like this for the last 2 hours.  I'm running Mac OS 10.5.8. with 2.6 GHz Inter Cor 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory.

[fzabkar]

If the drive still spins up, and if it is a 7200.11 series with SD15 or earlier firmware, then it may be affected by the BSY bug.

Can you remove it from the case? (Note that doing this may void your warranty.)

[boktors]

What's the BSY bug?  

At some point, the drive mounted, but it was "read only", I could not change the permission setting.  I used Disk Utility to verify the disk, but it failed. I can only erase it's contents.

It may have something to do with the fact that I've been using this external hard drive as a Time Machine Backup only, but the last couple of days, I created another folder on it and copied my iTunes music library to it. The reason it did this is because I started ran out of space on my laptop and I wanted to continue backing up my CD collection. 

[fzabkar]

If you can read/write from/to the drive, even if only intermittently, then it is not a firmware bug issue.

FYI, the following technical bulletin talks about the BSY bug that affects 7200.11 drives:

http://atulchitnis.net/files/seagate.pdf