Seagate Freeagent Hardrive not showing up in My computer or device Manager

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yiannimak15

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Sep 12, 2017
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I have a 500gb Seagate Freeagent Desktop external hardrive, which is not being read on any computers. I have tried reading it on three differecnt computers with no luck. The device cannot be found anywhere, including device manager and disk manager. I need to access the files on it to the drive cannot be wiped. There is power to the drive as the light is on and I can physically feel the disc moving inside the case. Thanks in advance for any help.
 
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Sedivy

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Dec 17, 2016
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Try plugging it into a few different SATA ports. Depending on the motherboard and how populated you have the connectors, some SATA ports may or may not be disabled.
Also, make a parted magic disc, and try booting off of it to see if it sees the hard drive.
 
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Sedivy

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Dec 17, 2016
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Oh. Forget sata ports then. Try parted magic. You can install it on a usb, don't need to be a cd/dvd. Parted magic is a linux distro that's only loaded in memory, not installed. Whatever hangups windows may be having with formats, trying it from linux designed for this kind of thing might allow you to wipe/reformat it and therefore make it accessible to windows as well. If it can't see it either, then I'm not sure.
 
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Sedivy

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Dec 17, 2016
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3,960
Well if parted magic is able to see it, then you can just copy files over to a usb or whatever you want to use for backup, before wiping. The idea with it is to see if it can access the drive at all, as in, if it's some sort of corruption or physical drive failure, or if it's just formatting or OS issue.
 
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seagate_surfer

seagate_surfer

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Mar 31, 2017
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You mentioned that you've tried multiple computers, have you tried using a different USB cable?

Is the drive seen at all in the BIOS?

One potential solution would be to try running SeaTools for DOS, sometimes the DOS version is a little better at being able to see drives that Windows has trouble spotting.

Note: If you hear any clicking sounds coming from the drive, don't attempt to plug it in or do anything with it yourself, as even powering it on when it's clicking could ruin any chance there could be of recovering the data on it. If this is the case, then professional data recovery may be your only/best bet.
 
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yiannimak15

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Sep 12, 2017
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No the drive is not seen in bios at all, and there is no clicking noise when the drive is plugged in, it just sounds like a normal hard drive

 
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