really vexed: Seagate 4TB USB not recognized in win 10 or bios but shows on other machine

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Timstertimster

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Apr 3, 2013
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I'm really vexed: bought a new backup drive, a seagate 4TB expansion drive, and loaded data on it after formatting it NTFS with 64kb cluster size. Everything worked fine.

Meanwhile I have a new mobo, a ASRock b350m Pro4, and suddenly, this drive is no longer visible at all.

Unsuccessful troubleshooting so far:

0. Checked if the drive's LED is on - yes, it is
1. Disk Management: no USB disk shown, only SATA disks
2. Reboot and check bios boot list: not shown
3. downloaded Seagate tools, none of them see the disk
4. plugged disk in other USB ports, even 2.0 ports
5. plugged into old win7 laptop, disk shows up (win7 can't load driver from win update though)
6. Plugged a different 300GB external drive into machine, it shows up no problem

One interesting tidbit: when I plug it in, windows shows USB tray icon and I can see "eject expansion", but eventually that disappears.


What else can I try to troubleshoot this?

Thanks.
 
Solution
seagate_surfer
Sorry to hear that you're running into trouble. You mentioned you've tried SeaTools, sometimes when the OS version of the tool can't see a disk, trying it in the DOS version can see it a little better, have you tried this version?

We definitely second some of the other comments suggesting to try a different cable. The cable you need is not anything proprietary to Seagate, it should just be a standard USB 3.0 Micro-B. The reason these cables are used is they are faster than previous generation USB connectors.

If you're still running into trouble after trying these things, it may be best to get in touch directly with Seagate Support here.
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dudeman509

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Jan 23, 2015
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Try a different cable.

My Seagate 3 TB Expansion started doing this after 3+ years of service. Turns out either the port or controller was going bad, as it would only work...intermittently...in USB 2.0 mode, and my desktop wouldn't communicate with it anymore because it disconnected/reconnected so many times any time the cable was touched in the slightest.

The drive still showed 100% health out of its enclosure, so it now lives in the desktop as a 'backup to the backup' drive.
 
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Timstertimster

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Good idea. But it's having no issues on the win 7 machine. Plus this being a seagate they use their own weird connector design so now I have to buy a cable just for that.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm really hoping it's not the controller board.
 
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dudeman509

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The cable that came with mine was a piece of junk. It's a USB to USB Micro-B cable. I picked one up off Amazon and it worked well for a few years.

 
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Timstertimster

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I've had seagate drives for decades and never had problems, but looking at newegg reviews for this particular one seems to me its just a low quality product line with oodles of issues on win 10 especially.

one thing I dont like about the seagate drives is their weird connector, its flimsy design and not common. why cant they just keep a standard USB connector? but we digress...

I also ran diskpart off a recovery win PE, just to check if the drive shows at all as a piece of hardware, but no luck.
 
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seagate_surfer

seagate_surfer

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Sorry to hear that you're running into trouble. You mentioned you've tried SeaTools, sometimes when the OS version of the tool can't see a disk, trying it in the DOS version can see it a little better, have you tried this version?

We definitely second some of the other comments suggesting to try a different cable. The cable you need is not anything proprietary to Seagate, it should just be a standard USB 3.0 Micro-B. The reason these cables are used is they are faster than previous generation USB connectors.

If you're still running into trouble after trying these things, it may be best to get in touch directly with Seagate Support here.
 
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