I think my second Hard Drive died!!!!
 

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) .

Possibly the USB to IDE circuitry, perhaps removing the drive and putting it on your IDE bus would solve it.

Does the drive appear online? Can you check it's size etc...?

The drive appears in My Computer, but I can not check the size or any other properties.
I think removing the drive from the USB case would void the warranty (I've only had it for 4 month), so I would rather not do it yet.

How it it powered? I'm thinking it's getting surges or something through it's power source, so if the power isn't regulated, or you are running hot, that could be the issue.

Well, if you have a backup then just try formatting it, thats the only way you'll find out whether or not it's a hardware problem or not...

I am using it's own power cord (the one provided with the hard drive) and have it connected to a surge protector.

I am not able to format or do much else with it. The only thing the HD does is show up in My Computer when't it's connected and doesn't show up when it isn't .

Spoke to Maxtor support yesterday.
They asked me to run a few diagnostics after which they said that problem was caused by corrupted file system table and suggested that I use data recovery software. Try two so far, but both froze mid-way.
I guess will try Norton Systemworks later on as well.