I RECENTLY purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini external hard drive. I have not used it yet. When I plugged it in, it did not automatically run the launch sequence, and upon further inspection it was not showing up in My Computer.

I went to the SEAGATE/Maxtor site and worked through their troubleshooting section. In Disk Manager the drive shows up as UNALLOCATED (black line). I was INSTRUCTED by the site to reformat the drive and assign it a drive letter. I cannot do this because you must first initialize the drive, and the problem I am having is that I cannot initialize the drive because it gives me the error "This disk is write-protected."

I have spent all day searching the Seagate/Maxtor site and dozens of online help forums but can NOT find a solution that works (or anyone with the exact same problem). Can someone please help? I am prepared to send the product back, but Seagate is awesome and makes you pay for your postage and packaging and I would rather avoid unnecessary costs if at all possible.

I am using Windows Vista on an HP computer. I am also logged in as the administrator.

Thanks! Have you tried using the SeaTools software that SHIPS with the drive to prepare it for use ? ?
If you didn't get a CD it's available FREE on their site...I downloaded the SeaTools software...

SMART test and Advanced tests are unavailable for the drive.

Short Drive Self Test passed.

Short Generic test failed. Not sure why the advanced test was unavailable...
Did you create a bootable CD and run it from there or the easy way running the Windows version ? ?