External USB HDD can't be mounted in Windows

MarcLister

MarcLister

MarcLister

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I've been given a colleague's Seagate external USB hard drive that isn't working in Windows. We've tried it on 3 computers and none of them will properly see the hard drive. There are some files that we need to access and, unfortunately, there are no other copies or backups!

When I tried it on my work PC, Windows took ages to install the Seagate USB driver and eventually failed. With my colleague's permission I removed the hard drive from the enclosure and tried it in my SATA external dock where we had pretty much the same problem. I had hoped that the fact that the USB connection on the side of the enclosure was a bit loose would mean that that was the problem.

The only thing I can think of to do tomorrow morning as a possible fix is to plug the hard drive directly into my PC so that it's connected by SATA cable to the motherboard and not going through a USB connection.

Failing that are there any other suggestions I could try to see if we can access the files? When I leave the hard drive in the SATA external dock, the drive powers up and I feel it spinning inside; however after a while it all dies down and there's no way of getting anything happening again.
 
Get something like Hirens boot cd and try the various data recovery tools, make sure you have enough space somewhere else to recover any files off to. Might be worth trying to take an image of the disk first. But it does sound like it might be on it's way to dying. So unless you'd then feel comfortable with trying things like trying to swap out the controller board etc on it I'd probably look into data recovery companies and see if the data is worth the cost.
 
Cheers chaosophy. I'll try Hirens boot CD. Can I make an image of the disk with Hirens boot CD?

The files that are needed are Word documents so not worth the cost and effort of data recovery companies. My colleague'll most likely have to spend most of tomorrow re-writing the reports. And I'll be sending an email to all staff telling them not to put their trust in one method of file storage. Two colleagues have now lost files because they only had them on a single storage medium. Neither of them bothered to have a copy of their files on our network which gets backed up each night. I do despair sometimes. :o

When I did my final year dissertation at Uni, we'd been told time and time again to have lots of copies of important files because we wouldn't get extensions given to us if we lost files. I ended up keeping copies of my work on a pen drive, on my iPod, on my Uni secure private file space, on an email to me and on my computer! Probably took it a bit too far to be honest. :D
 
Tell them to use Skydrive

Does the pc show aanything in device manager when you connect it with your USB drive?
 
bledd. said:
Tell them to use Skydrive
Click to expand...
I'm going to tell people to do anything as long as they have at least 2 copies of their files.

bledd. said:
Does the pc show aanything in device manager when you connect it with your USB drive?
Click to expand...
After a long while there is an entry, "Disk drive". There is very little information about the drive in Device Manager though. Worryingly Disk Management in Computer Management lists a drive as having over 3.86GB of capacity. My PC's HDD and DVD drive are listed separately so I know the 3.86GB one is the external drive. The problem is that its a 1TB drive.

Once Disk Management can see the drive, it tells me to Initialize the Disk and gives me an option of MBR or GPT. Selecting MBR doesn't work.

I've used Seagate's drive testing utility and it passed all the tests until the long generic where it found 100+ errors and then passed a verdict of fail.

Is there any point continuing with this or is there a chance of getting the documents back? To put the situation into context, the documents are a teacher's annual review documents and the deadline for getting them ready was yesterday hence the soon to be written email about making more backups!
 
MarcLister said:
Once Disk Management can see the drive, it tells me to Initialize the Disk and gives me an option of MBR or GPT. Selecting MBR doesn't work.
Click to expand...

Thats sounding more and more like a fault on the disk sadly. When asking to initialize the disk is when the MBR has been corrupted/removed and the partition information and disk information has been lost.

I used a program called EASE US: Recovery to get stuff off a disk like this before, It took 27 hours to scan the disk, and that was in a USB to SATA docking Station.
 
Meekal said:
Thats sounding more and more like a fault on the disk sadly. When asking to initialize the disk is when the MBR has been corrupted/removed and the partition information and disk information has been lost.

I used a program called EASE US: Recovery to get stuff off a disk like this before, It took 27 hours to scan the disk, and that was in a USB to SATA docking Station.
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Thanks for the program suggestion. Just tried it and it can find the drive but can't get anything off it. I'm going to say it's dead and not waste any more time on this.

Thanks for all the help and ideas, I'll use them next time. :)
 
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