I am a file hoarder. I rarely do a clean up. Most of my files are duplicated. I have a grand total of over 5 TBs of data stored on 3 hard drives, 2 of them are Seagate-Owned, plus 1 Seagate drive that is gone for good (went old and died, files backed up on my 2TB drive)
My 2TBSFGDED (2TB Seagate Freeagent GoFlex Desk External Drive) was bought recently (I can't remember when I bought it... between 3 months ago to a year ago), and it's worked fine until the day it started making beeping noises. I checked the drive by accessing it, and although I could enter the drive, nothing would show up, and the explorer window locked up! Since I couldn't do anything more with related applications, like the Taskbar, which brings up the Start Menu, which you use to get it it... and My computer icons, also a way to it, as well as shortcut icons on my desktop which located to the drive, I decided to unplug the drive (I couldn't get the taskbar up to safetly disconnect the drive, even the keyboard didn't respond... so I couldn't bring up the Task Manager or as such.)
As a precaution, I unplugged everything, restarted the computer, then, when I was on the desktop window, I replugged the drive and reconnected it. The drive turned on and seemed to work fine...
But then I get a pop up message saying something like this:
You must format disk in drive (<insert drive letter here>
before you can use it.
With the options:
"OK" and "Cancel"
I clicked cancel, and it went away, then popped up Error: Data Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check.
I tried disk check in all the ways I new, and it always told me: The disc check could not be performed because Windows can't access the disk.
Defragmenting the disc gave the same error, as well as back-up. I look into it's properties, and I find that the drive has no name anymore, and has 0/0 Used bytes and 0/0 Free Space. There are no previous versions to roll back to, and my computer's system restore for some reason was never set up properly, so restoring is not an option.
A System Recovery is out of the question.
In the Computer Management, I look into disc Management and find a problem:
The single partition, which was once NTFS, is now a RAW format, which somewhat makes sense why it demands to be reformatted. The other parts of the problem are still questionable.
The day before this error happened, I was trying to fix a video problem, looking through the Services to enable video settings in Windows Media Player. What are the required services to be turned on or off for a Seagate Drive to Work? I might've thrown a switch or two, which could've concieved this error.
But I don't think that is the problem.
In fact, I suspect that the damage was done when I pulled the plug. But the bit before that is still a mystery. My computer was set up by me to never turn off, power down, or go to sleep, as well as my drives, via the advanced power settings.
Since I set it up, the computer has been making more and more noise, which I can tell it's the same sound as my last computer made, right before the hard disk grinding (Previous Computer, Pre-Seagate Error, No connection to this problem.)
I think my external drive was bogging down and getting ready to stop working because it was on 24/7 non-stop.
It held thousands of music files, hundreds of video files, thousands of pictures, dozens of applications, and countless more of other important files... about 250 GB of the drive was already used up.
I would've carried a back up, but I have so many files... it would take forever to back them up, and my computer may be powerful but it's not very fast. Problem 2 is that I would have to buy 3 2 TB drives to back up ALL my drives, and drives that big are not cheap.
I'm not sure I can recover my files now... the "Windows cannot access disk" error I believe would prevent such a feat from programs like EaseUs and Recover My Files and similar... I've run into instances where users on other websites couldn't use them.
Unless I format the drive from RAW to NTFS, I will not be able to access the drive. But I think Formatting the Drive from RAW to NTFS will wipe out all the precious data on external hard drive for good. Is there another way I can get it to be a NTFS without wiping out the data?
If I am to wipe out the data by reformatting, I would like a Software I can use to the full extent without purchase that will 100% sucessfully recover my files from the drive even though they've been wiped. 10 years of work is on that drive, and I can't afford to lose it now.
I promise to buy a larger back up external hard drive to keep to the side for reasons like these.
But I have little chance of my parents allowing me to buy a drive to recover my files to, and then buying another larger drive as back-up: $500+ out of pocket, and I/my parents don't have that kind of money! We don't/won't borrow loans either.
I bought the TBSFGDED all on it's own with a warranty. I don't have any way to tell if the warranty expired because I don't have anything on the drive (casing) to give such info. They ask for info, but I can supply none, so everything will be expensive to fix ($369 for a data recovery plus $?00 for an extra 3TB hard drive (I'm not buying a 2TB this time, and 1-1.5TB is not enough))
If any of you have this problem, now is the time to say so. If you have a solution, I'm all ears.
I have also tried:
Plugging the drive into the original or different external usb slot
Switching out for another cable (They are really rare... the cable is made just for the device, and no other.)
Using a different power outlet
Using a different power cable.
Trying the device on several other computers with different OS
I am running:
A Windows 7 Professional 32 bit edition with 8 (4) GB of Ram, a NVIDIA Graphics Chip, and an AMD Phenom X4 core. Updated to current version.
Software is not an issue, so don't go about telling me to install any... it worked before on my computer.
I never had a problem with the drives shutting down except on my first Seagate drive, which died and was disposed of some time ago.
Update.
Turns out that after taking it out for a while (A whole night), turning my Ext HDD offline (At Disk Management) and then back online, and also (after a couple of tries, when i scanned the disk) I managed to complete the *repair* in which it then said, in a matter of words "windows has completed the scan and nothing is wrong".
All of a sudden I could get in and everything was fine?
I hope that helps dude? I dont know what exactly helped the most but just try go through everything you can man
