I'm having issues with a maxtor onetouch 120g usb drive. I defragmented it in windows a few days ago, and upon reboot, the drive wasn't recognized. The device showed up, and and it was even assigned a drive letter, but it didn't have the name I gave it, and when I went to open it, my whole computer froze. In linux, I can open the drive and read from it no problem, fdisk and cfdisk report nothing wrong as far as I can tell, I ran 'fdisk -l /dev/sda' and it showed up quite happily, and 'cfdisk /dev/sda' gave me no troubles either can anyone think of why this would be? my only thoughts are there are a few bits of data that were stored that gave windows what it wanted, and now they are somewhere else. thanks in advance, Mike

Don't you think this is more of a Windows question? One way to solve your problem would be to do a full backup in Linux with cp, tar, or whatever else, make a new filesystem on the drive, and restore the contents.

what does fdisk -l /dev/sda display, particularly ID & System?

I think it more a Linux problem seeing as how I'm using linux to diagnose it and repair it. fdisk -l /dev/sda says 14946 cylinders, id c, system Win95 FAT32 (LBA). Hmm, interestingly enough, it says it starts at cylinder one, and ends at 14593, leaving like 350 cylinders unused...

Windows won't allocate the last cylinder of a drive for historical reasons, but that doesn't explain the 350. 14593 actually sounds like the correct number. 14593*255*63*512 = 120.0315*10^9 bytes, just over 120 marketing Gb. What version of Windows are you running? A dell 2.8GHz would have come with Windows XP, which refuses to create FAT32 partitions that large but should read them just fine. Was the drive preformatted, or did you use a 3rd party utility? The reason I think it's a Windows problem is because the problem began after doing something in Windows and only affects Windows.