How do I get my computer to recognize my external hard drive ?
i’ve had this freeagent seagate desktop external hard drive (250 gb) for little over 4 months. Now suddenly since yesterday it just stopped working and my computer doesnt recognize it at all. I’ve looked in other forums and places and still those methods dont work. It just doesnt seem to recognize it. My flash drive 1gb works and other devices that use the USB port seem to work, just this one is an exception.
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if it’s the USB-only model then it might be a bad interface on the drive. Probably an obvious question to ask but have you tried connecting the drive with a different cable?
yes i’ve tried with another cable but still it doesnt work
You’re looking at one of three possible outcomes concerning the ‘external drive’ (if the hard drive is not making any strange noises-i.e. grinding, or clicking sounds):
1. A ‘fried’ or otherwise shorted USB logic board inside the drive; you can either send out for warranty repair (I’m pretty sure you’d lose your data according to Seagate’s policy); in this case your data will definitely be lost; or
2. A bad USB port (the actual connector in the rear of the unit; the same course of action would apply here too, unless there are multiple ports on the rear of the drive); for example one line of the Seagate FreeAgent series hard drives have ‘triple’ interfaces-USB, Firewire, and eSATA. You would simply connect the drive via one of the other connectors (but this is probably not the case in your drive-probably one single USB-right?)...and lastly,
3. A bad or corrupted master directory block(s) in the main directory part of the hard drive (think of this like the ‘table of contents’ for a book, but for the individual files on the physical platters of the drive). This can be checked/possibly repaired with utility software. On the Mac OS X platform, this is included in the Disk Utility app in the Utilities folder. There may/may not be an equivalent for Windows OS’s (not sure-I’m a mac-centric user). If it can be repaired, you should not lose much (if any) data, if not repairable, you would need to re-format the entire drive (low-level format), and lose all of the data.
One last thing-this may void the warranty, so I told you so, and at your own risk-open your hard drive enclosure, transplant the hard disk to another external enclosure or an internal slot in your tower (that is, if the drives are the same type as the internal bus-Macs for instance use Serial ATA, PCs of old use EIDE/ATA, or in some rare instances SCSI). If your drive is fine then on startup your computer will mount the hard drive as a second internal drive. Then, you could back up the data onto another disk, then do what you will with the original hard disk…
Hope this info helps…
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