External hard drive says no disk and no media

stamp001

Honorable
Oct 27, 2013
1
0
10,510
My external hard drive has stopped working suddenly: whenever I plug it into the USB port it asks me to please insert a disk into drive F or whatever. I've gone to disk management and it says that Disk 1 is there in removable drive F but that there is no media detected. Changing the drive letter hasn't helped either. It's a new hard drive- I'd literally used it once (my dad set it up but I'm away from home for a few months now) and then it stopped being recognised.

The hard drive is seagate and I use windows vista. I wiped my laptop about a week before first using the hard drive.

Also, when I click on device properties it says that the device is working properly, but clearly it isn't?!

Please could anybody help?! I really want the data from the drive!
 
1. Start the PC in safe-mode then plug the external drive, see if it gets detected or not!

2. Try the ex drive on the back USB ports of MB. Any port will work USB2/3.

3. Try it on another system or another OS.

4. Two data recovery software's : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

http://download.cnet.com/Zero-Assumption-Recovery/3000-2248_4-10061981.html

5. If nothing works and you are desperate to get the data back then format the OS of PC/Laptop, clean install OS, then try the drive, now it will work hopefully. Good luck.