Brand new hard drive failed - What are my options? Please help

[David_VI]

I bought a new Seagate 4tb from OCUK in April last year, the rest of the drives in my PC are much much older, yet it seems this newest one has failed.
Earlier I was playing a game and it kept locking up. I tried to reboot then Windows wouldn't start, I had the spinning dots.
I unplugged each HDD one by one and when this 4TB drive was unplugged Windows would boot fine.

I plugged the 4TB drive into an enclosure and it doesn't show up in Explorer, in disk management it shows just as "Read only -16384.00GB Healthy GPT Protective Partition". With no options to do anything with it.

In fear I downloaded whatever recovery software I could find. EaseUS Data Recovery is scanning and showing lots of my files, so they're on it. But of course it costs me money to restore them and I don't have a big enough drive to put them on.

I know the drive is in warranty, do I go through OCUK for this?
Ideally I need a replacement first, so I can (if I can find affordable software) get the files off then send the drive back.
Seagate's warranty process wants the drive sent first, which isn't ideal.
Or do I go through OCUK?

I've never had a drive fail in over 20 years and it being this new one really worries me. Also the fact software can see the files, yet I can't access them normally baffles me. Is there anything I can do to try get the drive seen properly by Windows again?

I have some of the files backed up but a lot aren't so i'm keen to come to a solution

Recommendations please...

 

[landyvlad]

I suggest you start by ringing OCUK directly for advice.

It;s a good practice to have regular backups for just such occasions. You should consider buying an inexpensive external hard drive that way you can back up your existing files to it, and then RMA the drive per the manufacturer instructions.

There are a range with 2TB around GBP65 and 4 TB around GBP90
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/peripherals/portable-storage/external-hard-drives

 

[Snapshot]

It's a fact of real life that a small percentage of drives fail early. You've just been unlucky with this one. I have a Samsung 2TB SSD that's got far too many block re-assignments and other errors but won't give me a hard fail so I can get it swapped out. As your drive is under one year old your first contact must be with OcUK as that's who your contract is with.

 

[Datamonkey]

Check out Recuva you may have some luck with that,

Its free also.

Hope it helps