Quote - If you dare, open the housing of the external HD

I'll give that some thought. Computers scare me. It's taken almost 6 years, but I finally learned how to reformat my laptop with the help of Dell :) I've never "tinkered" with hardware, I don't even like to install hardware. I'd rather pay someone to manage my hardware issues and just leave me to turning it on and using it ;) The drive is only 19GB. In October, I had contacted Maxtor about the trouble and that's how I learned that it was an internal drive in an external drive casing. They told me that they've never had a 19GB external drive. They did give me a toll free number to call and talk to their tech, but after I formatted it back then, it worked well, so I didn't bother following through calling them.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi