Maxtor One Touch III Drive status 10 cannot start

I have added this non-cookery related technical note to Cookipedia because it will be found easily by search engines and may prove useful to people with the same problem which some people may find tricky to diagnose.

System

Windows Service pack II running XP home on a Dell Pentium 4 PC.

Problem

The Maxtor drive had been running fine on the PC however, once re-booted it showed the initial BIOS start-up prompt but then never got to the Windows start-up screen, instead showing a flashing cursor top right and never getting any further.

If the One Touch III drive was disconnected the PC would boot without a problem however, on connecting the USB drive to the PC, the PC would fail to find the drive even when using 'Add New Hardware'. When viewing system devices using System | Device Manager, the USB Mass Storage Device section for the Maxtor drive showed a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. The error associated with this was Status (10) - Cannot start.

Connecting another Maxtor One Touch III to the same system produced similar results. The white status led / switch showed white when the PSU was connected with or without the USB cable connected.

The solution

The solution was to replace the external power supply unit, the faulty PSU was obviously not able to provide the power to start the drive, though it was able to run the drive from a previous boot-up whilst the PSU was OK.

A generic PSU would almost certainly work providing it can supply 12 v DC @ 2.5 amps.

I hope this may be useful to someone. --Chef 15:44, 30 May 2010 (BST)

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