About my seagate 160 gb hard drive (external)

Since this external hard drive is USB powered and felt on the floor, you could have a broken USB connector or interface card, both located inside hard disk case, you should contact Seagate technical support or repair service, or if you have electronics skills, you could open and check hardware by yourself.

Try connecting it to a different USB port on your computer.
Try connecting it to a USB port on a different computer.
If the problem continues, then one of the two major components inside the enclosure:
* disk-drive
* USB-to-disk-drive adapter
have failed.
Open the enclosure, and remove the disk-drive, and connect it as a "slave" disk-drive in a desktop computer, to see if the disk-drive, by itself, still is accessible. If not, then you could buy a new disk-drive, and "transplant" it into the enclosure, to "resurrect" your external enclosure.

Is the disk-drive still under warranty? If so, contact Seagate, and exercise the warranty, to get a replacement.

Remove the hard drive from the Maxtor case, purchase an USB hard drive adapter case, and install the hard drive inside this case. Then you can connect this to the computer's USB port and if the hard drive is OK then this computer will detect it as an external USB hard drive, then you can open the folders and files and back them up.

It sounds disk I/O is creating problem refershing the contents in hard drive.

You can try changing the drive letter on your hard drive, might help.
http://www.wikihow.com/Change-a-Drive-Letter-in-Windows-XP

Also, if any kind of corruption, you can try disk error checking scandisk
http://www.pctechguide.com/tutorials/HDDMaint_Chkdsk.htm

If nothing works, there is other way to see your data in cmd
go to Start->run->type "cmd" and hit enter

To go to your External drive's letter you should know the drive for eg, if your external drive letter is D Drive just type D: in cmd and hit enter. Now you will see he prompt D:\, type dir to list the directories and files in that directory/folder

If you are able to see your files in CMD, you can still back them up
Try following link for more information
http://dosprompt.info/

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/206395en

Check if the jumpers on the hard disks are in the right position.

Your hard-drive is crashed and unreadable by win32.dll what you can do is try kick starting by using your friend computer it just might do it. I had same problem and I asked my son to using my hard-drive on his PC. It worked and still working. good luck

Your hard-drive is crashed and unreadable by win32.dll what you can do is try kick starting by using your friend computer it just might do it. I had same problem and I asked my son to using my hard-drive on his PC. It worked and still working. good luck

Chkdsk /F /X D:

(replace D: with the letter of the drive)

you can also try CHKDSK /F /X /R D:

Did you try reinstalling the drivers and software for it? I have a Seagate FreeAgent drive and once it went to sleep, it did that exact same thing. I kept playing with it, and rebooting the PC and it finally woke up. On the FreeAgent I was able to then tell it never to sleep again.

Geno