External hard drive stopped working, only shows up as Local Disk -- won't open

[fish7718]

Alright, I have a whole bunch of my music and videos on my external hard drive and I got a new Dell XPS 8300 yesterday. I had been using my external hard drive just fine for the past 1-2 yeas now with 2 different laptops, working fine. I plugged it yesterday to transfer all my music to my new computer and it seemed to be working fine. There was an error as the copy rate slowwed so I decided to delete and try again. I did that about 3 times and then decided to just copy the music album by album. Eventually, I don't know how it ended up happening, instead of the Hard Drive coming up as Seagate on the My Computer Tab, it started showing up as Local Disk: J on my Dell and Local Disk E on my laptop now. It doesn't matter where I plug it in. Not only that, it won't open when I try to open it. It will get 95% loaded and then just pause and stop responding. I'm completely lost.

My hard drive is Seagate 250 GB.

 

[Mark56]

Hi, first I would run the Seagate diagnostics to check the hard drive is still healthy following this guide.

Identify the make of your hard drive and then use one of the links below to get the manufacturers diagnostic for ISO CD. Burn the image file to a CD, boot the PC with the disc in the drive and run the diagnostics. You first need to set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order in the Bios setup.

If you do not have an image burner use this free software to make the CD.

http://www.isoimageburner.com/



ExcelStor: http://www.excelstor.com/eng/support.php?sub_id=3

Hitachi/IBM: http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_es.html

Seagate, Maxtor & Quantum:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads

Western Digital:http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Toshiba Fujitsu: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=SoftwareUtilities#diagnostic

If you have a Toshiba hard drive I would suggest the use of the diagnostics from the Seagate link as this will work on all makes of drive and on any OS.

It sounds likely that the circuitry in the drive enclosure is failing (or the drive), if the test won't run then remove the drive from the enclosure and purchase a USB Hard Drive adapter, or use the internal connections in a desktop PC to connect the drive. This should allow you to run the test and/or extract all the files.

If the test runs ok with the drive connected to another PC internally, or with a USB adapter then you will know for sure that it is the enclosure that has failed.

 

[fish7718]

Thanks for the reply, at the moment I am unable to make a CD but I will definitely get on that. If that didn't work out do you of any other possibilities? And what are the chances of me recovering the data on it?

 

[Mark56]

In most cases, if the drive is not too bad, you can read from it and copy the data off. I would suggest getting a USB hard drive adapter (about €10).

Once the tests is run we can go from there.