Seagate External Hard Drive Failed - Now What?

[firebirdta84]

I built an external hard drive using a Seagate Barracuda 300GB drive in an enclosure about 1 year ago. The other day, I turned it on but the drive wouldn't show in Windows Explorer. The computer just froze and it stayed that way until I turned the drive off. When I turn it off, it says the drive needs formatted. The drive shows up as working fine in Device Manager (and the drivers are up to date) but doesn't show in Disk Management (just causes it to freeze on that screen, too). I'm running Windows Vista and it never had a problem before. I've tried hooking it up to an XP machine with no luck either. I've also tried to hook it up as a second internal drive on the XP machine. When I do this, it shows as a drive in Windows Explorer but when I click on it, it says it needs formatted and shows 0 capacity/0 bytes used. Can anyone recommend a course of action for me? I'd like to try everything I can to get it to work before shipping it off to someone as it contains a lot of personal information. Perhaps a good software utility?

Thanks,
Joe

 

[firebirdta84]

PS The drive spins fine and sounds normal.

 

[vacunita]

Sounds like a corrupted File table. you could try GetDataBack to get the information off, then format and copy the information back.

At the very least GetDataBack will tell you if there's something else wrong with the drive such as damaged sectors. and will let you see in what state your information is.

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[shoalcreek]

How is your USB connection? I assume you are using USB? Try another cable. See if your power is good. Try a different power cable if you have one.