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Seagate External Hard Drive not showing up in My Computer

Tags:
  • Storage
  • Disk Management
  • External Hard Drive
  • Computers
  • Seagate
Last response: in Storage
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September 27, 2014 7:20:06 PM

Hey guys,

I have a 3TB USB 3.0 Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive which worked fine until very recently. The drive has data on it. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. When I plug the external hard drive into my PC it does not show up in my computer. It is showing up in Device Manager and it says that the drive is working properly. It won't show up in Seatools either.

The drive sometimes shows up in Disk Management but it says "Unknown" and "Not Initialized". I'm given no other option except it says "Offline". When I open Disk Management it sometimes asks me to initialize the disk as MBR or GPT.

When I click the option initialize Disk as GPT I see an error message saying "The System Cannot Find the File Specified". The external hard drive was originaly formated as GPT at least a year ago.

I booted off the Ubuntu Disk and connected the external hard drive when Ubuntu was loaded but the drive won't show up there. I uninstalled the driver software software in Device Manager but no effect.

I can safely remove the external hard drive from the PC. When I plug the external hard drive into the PC it sometimes install the driver software but it takes a long time to install the drivers for the drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

More about : seagate external hard drive showing computer

a b G Storage
September 27, 2014 7:37:05 PM

I would try the drive on another computer - and also switch out the USB cable. If neither fix the issue - the drive may be bad.....
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September 28, 2014 12:07:14 AM

I tried both without success.
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a b G Storage
September 28, 2014 7:47:33 AM

It is looking like a funeral for the drive will be in order. If there are very important files on the drive - there is a 50/50 chance that an identical drive (same make/model number) could fix things - as the controller cards for these USB devices break often (you simply switch out the HDD in the external case).

If the data is very important - I would suggest a data recovery specialist.

External drives are nice for moving files around - they are not good choices for permanent use - they are knocked over easily, and if they are accessing data (reading and/or writing) and are bumped - the HDD crashes and you lose everything in a lot of cases.....
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