Does lightning strik twice? Maybe so.
I have an external Maxtor 5000 LE hard drive connected to the PC using a USB2 port. Yesterday evening it stopped working, giving me the following error when I try to access it : "E: is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error" .

I tried to reinstall the drive's drivers, then I tried to re-install the USB drivers, then I tried to use a different USB cable. None of those methods worked. I also tried connecting the drive to a different PC, but got the same error.

Any ideas on what, other then a dead drive could be causing the problem?

I checked the Maxtor's knowledge base as well as the manual, but didn't find an answer. I will obviously try calling them tomorrow, if I can't figure out anything else.

This time I have a backup of the data (at least the parts which are actually important) .