- May 4, 2013
- 29
- 0
- 10,540
A few days ago, my Seagate external (http://amzn.com/B00HFRWXV0) stopped working. My brother was using it to install a repack (game) and his computer froze on him, so the drive was yanked out and the PC restarted. Prior to this, Windows told me the drive had errors on it, most likely referring to some corrupt data I already knew about and hadn't yet got around to repairing. I find it unlikely that either of these two could have caused my drive to fail, since to my knowledge, drives cannot die because of corrupt data; the data may be lost, but it shouldn't kill the whole thing.
Current symptoms
When plugging in the drive via USB, my computer plays the device detected sound and it shows up in Device Manager with the correct name.
It is unusable since it doesn't show up in either My Computer or Disk Management.
The drive doesn't emit any noises that suggest hardware failure. After spin up, I only hear its usual hum. There are no clicks, scratches, or loose items bouncing around in it.
It behaves the same in all 4 computers I've tested it on. It's also the 3rd Seagate to fail on me; a few weeks ago, I had a Seagate 2.5 External mysteriously fail on me as well, but this one wasn't yanked out or anything like that. It was working fine, and then when I plugged it in one day, it was no longer recognized.
So two things:
1. I would like to plug it in internally, but the SATA cables I have are of the smaller variety. Can anyone point me to these cables, http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf-JAVA/Doc/images/446/c01390386.jpg, on Amazon?
2. Could it be that the drive's controller failed? And if so, is there anything I can do to regain access to the data? Can the controller be replaced?
Current symptoms
When plugging in the drive via USB, my computer plays the device detected sound and it shows up in Device Manager with the correct name.
It is unusable since it doesn't show up in either My Computer or Disk Management.
The drive doesn't emit any noises that suggest hardware failure. After spin up, I only hear its usual hum. There are no clicks, scratches, or loose items bouncing around in it.
It behaves the same in all 4 computers I've tested it on. It's also the 3rd Seagate to fail on me; a few weeks ago, I had a Seagate 2.5 External mysteriously fail on me as well, but this one wasn't yanked out or anything like that. It was working fine, and then when I plugged it in one day, it was no longer recognized.
So two things:
1. I would like to plug it in internally, but the SATA cables I have are of the smaller variety. Can anyone point me to these cables, http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf-JAVA/Doc/images/446/c01390386.jpg, on Amazon?
2. Could it be that the drive's controller failed? And if so, is there anything I can do to regain access to the data? Can the controller be replaced?
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