Paragon Recovery CD does not see the external Maxtor HD - strange

[jumanji]

I usually take my backups running the Paragon Advanced Recovery CD ISO (Win-PE based;provided with Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 11) from a multiboot pendrive and write the image to another partition in the internal drive. Later I copy it to the Maxtor external drive.

Today I tried to backup my C drive directly to my external 300GB Maxtor One Touch II hard disk. To my chagrin, the external drive would not show up. The program would try to recognise it but after 5 minutes throw up the error message
" I/O error on hard disk Drive 1 has occurred. The hard disk read or write operation has failed. This may be due to hardware problems. 1.Retry the operation 2.Ignore the error - the prog. might work incorrectly or your data may become corrupted in this case. 3. Ignore all errors - the prog. might work incorrectly or your data may become corrupted in this case."

Click on 2 or 3 the partitions on the Maxtor External drive will show up on the drive map but as "not formatted" So I cannot write the image onto it.

I then connected my Seagate GoFlex USB external hard drive which showed up without any problem.Wrote the image to it.

Now back to the Maxtor External Drive. Windows 7 and the Paragon HD Manager run from within Windows 7 could see it and read or write into it. Screenshot below.



I have been using one partition in it to back up my data using SyncBack. No problems. The other partition contains the periodical back-ups.

Anyway alarmed that it may be on the brink of giving up, I copied all the 150GB of data into the Seagate external drive and proceeded to check the Maxtor with Seagate Seatools for Windows.

Running the Long Generic Test for almost two hours, it finally said "Passed". No bad sectors at all. (The long Generic Test can find the bad sectors and repair, if possible, for external drives. To find and repair bad sectors in the Internal drives, one has to run the SeaTools DOS version)

Now the question is Why does my Maxtor drive fail to show up when I run the Recovery CD? What should I do?

 

[essenbe]

My first guess is that it is connected by firewire. Firewire, like USB 3.0 in not natively supported. It must have the drivers to operate or be seen. The drivers are located in the OS. So, when you boot to a recovery USB or CD, the OS is not loaded (so drivers are not loaded) therefore those ports don't work. I suspect your Seagate hard drive is USB 2.0 which is natively supported.

 

[jumanji]

Your guess is a good one but unfortunately it is not the case. I was aware of this issue from day one I bought this Maxtor External drive 6-7 years back and am only using the USB for connecting it to the desktop eversince I started using it to save the backup system images. I was using Firewire before.

I have to further state the Shadowprotect Desktop and Acronis TIH 11 WinPE recovery CDs - also run from my multiboot pendrive - have no difficulty in picking up the Maxtor drive and writing the images into it or reading from it.

It really beats me. The two partitions in the external drive are NTFS formatted. Screenshot below - the same Paragon HD Manager 11 suite running from within Windows. I took the image and wrote it into it too.

 

[essenbe]

I have never used Paragon so I'm probably not much help. Many of these issues come up simply due to hardware or software incompatibilities. But, if I am not mistaken, the maxtor one touch is a backup drive in itself isn't it? I have used the same software, but not that drive. I'm just wondering if there is not some compatibility issue with the software's involved. Plus, I thought the one touch was a little different than a normal external hard drive. Am I correct in those assumptions?

 

[jumanji]

Yes, it came with a backup software ( I don't even remember the name) and a one touch driver for it.. But I am not using any of those. My desktop does not even have traces of it. I am using it purely as an external drive with the native Windows drivers. Same case with the Seagate Freeagent Go/GoFlex external drives. The first thing I do is to reformat the drive and remove all junk they deliver with the drive.

If no tangible solution comes out, I plan to reformat the Maxtor External drive using the Paragon Hard Disk Manager itself and check whether it will accept its own baby failing which I have to use the Seagate External drives for saving the system images.

 

[essenbe]

I do too with the GoFlex drives, but the backup software with the one touch works real well, I believe it's the Replica. It has saved me several times. I really don't know what to suggest, or why the recovery disk can't see your drive. Maybe someone else will have a better idea.