Seagate External Hard Drive.

[SOD'EM]

Hi all.

I bought a Seagate External Hard Drive for my son and it has been working fine for over a year.

For some reason now, it only shows up in Device Manager for about 30 seconds then disappears.

 

It doesn't show in My PC at all.

 

Whilst it is showing in Device Manager, it says it is working properly.

If I send it back to Seagate, they want £700 to retrieve the data on it which I cannot afford.

 

I have a couple of Driver Updates programs on my Laptop, but it doesn't stay connected for long enough.

Tried it in another Laptop that wasn't Windows 10 (as there is some online suggestions that that may be the problem), and it did stay connected,

but any attempt to update the driver failed.

 

Any ideas?

 

[Andyorch]

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/external-drive-not-recognized-this-is-how-to-fix-it-in-windows/

[BazzaS]

If it is working on a 2nd laptop and only intermittently on the first : sounds like a driver issue.

 

However, it may be an intermittent connection problem, or failing power connection.

 

Do you have a backup of any critical data / of the whole drive?

Copy any key data off onto the 2nd laptop.

Then use the 2nd laptop to  mirror / copy the whole drive onto a new external hard drive.

 

if the first hard drive then fails completely during this : hopefully you’ll have they key data safe first of all.

 

You can then investigate if it is just a driver issue, and if a physical problem if the 1st drive is salvageable from within its enclosure (it might be able to be mounted in a new enclosure or external docking station), but get whatever backups you can (key files first!).

 

Check the integrity of those copied files to ensure the data is intact before trying anything heroic, if at all possible.

[dx100uk]

you shouldn't need any drivers for it.

 

is it powered by an external PSU?

bet that's the problem.

 

take it out the box

and pop it in your home PC as an extra internal HDD bet it works fine.

 

 

 

[BazzaS]

Some external drives are just SATA drives in an enclosure, and can be removed from the enclosure.

 

Some have their connectors integral or soldered on : hence my advice to get backups (if possible) before opening up the enclosure and finding it is unhelpfully one of the latter and not the former!

[labrat]

Not run across many of the soldered on ones

 

I have an old seagate drive that a friends kid poured a glass of water on (regular thing with that kid) wouldn't show at all

 

Clipped the casing off with a screwdriver and put in a £2 AliExpress caddy

 

Still reads fine a year later and Crystal disk shows as fine, makes me wonder how many good hdds get chucked due to dead caddys

[BazzaS]

10 minutes ago, labrat said:

Not run across many of the soldered on ones

 

Sadly, I have.

The once only, but it scuppered my plans to put the 3 1/2 inch drive into a docking station to see if I could then mount it / rescue the data!