I'm having huge problems with my Maxtor external storage drive. Since I upgraded to XP, the drive won't boot up. It stalls before Windows loads and says something like "required kernel not found. Windows couldn't load". If I restart the pc, it tries to check it for errors and stalls. If I turn the Maxtor drive off and unplug it, the pc works fine. The drive is connected via Maxtor Firewire. I have called Maxtor about this and told me it's Microsoft's problem. I contacted microsoft, and they told me it's Maxtor's problem. Has anyone run into similar problems with Maxtor and XP? I have 5000+ songs amd pictures on the drive, which I don't want to loose. If I go into "my computer" and disable everything that has to do with the Maxtor, the Maxtor drive works fine after next boot for a while, but stalls when I try to retrive a file. HELP!!!!!!!

Have experienced the exact same scenario with my Maxtor 80GB Firewire (since running under ME)... Maxtor continues to insist this is a MS problem, MS insists that the Maxtor drive is the problem, ad nauseum... XP won't run CHKDSK on the drive, Norton can't check it (most of the time), and it cannot be converted to NTFS. Maxtor's own utilities won't work with this drive. I briefly considered ripping the drive out of the case and installing it inside my PC, but that seems out of the question, because it appears to be attached to the controller/powersupply in a permenant manner... I've basically given up on this piece of hardware, and just use it for off-line storage... I would suggest you start burning your songs & pictures to CD (which is what I did) and don't rely on this for anything other than off-line storage...

Well - isn't THIS interesting. I have two machines at home - one has a Maxtor 80gig firewire hanging off of it. Both machines *were* running Windows ME - but I decided to upgrade one of them to XP. (The one that the drive was NOT connected to.) Now, the ME machine with the Maxtor is running fine, but if I try to attach to the Maxtor drive (which is shared in ME) with the XP machine - the XP machine crashes. Boom. I just got on the net to see if anyone else has seen this. It sounds like the same problem you guys are seeing, except the drive isn't on the XP box. Any solutions yet? - Rob

Hi, I had the same problem. I tried the recovery program to get the data back. The program I used was GetDataBack and Easy Recovery. I was able to recover any recognizable drive. Now, my problem is that only the first partition on that hard drive was recognized. I tried to recover the second partition on that hard drive but it has error message saying "bad parameter in boot sector" and have 2 "!" beside mass storage controller. Does anyone know how to fix this? Please email me. Any advice is appreciated. Thank you. Mexanh