Good morning.
I recently purchased two Seagate Backup Plus Portable 750 GB drives and one Backup Plus Desktop 1.5 TB drive to use on several Windows 7 64-bit computers. I used one portable on a laptop and it works great. But last night, I tried to use the desktop drive on my desktop computer and I simply cannot get it to show up in Windows Explorer. It shows up as a "removable media" in my notification area and as a device in device manager (with the "Seagate Backup Plus Desk" name). But it does not show up under Storage in Disk Management within the Computer Management section of the Control Panel. I thought that perhaps the drive may be trying to use an in-use drive letter, or maybe it is simply not being assigned one, so I wanted to change it through here, but because it does not show up under Disk Management, I have no option of doing so.
According to Disk Management, nothing that is plugged in is using any drive except C.
D is assigned to my DVD drive, but it does not show up within the Disk Management window. This leads me to ask the question: how can I figure out what drive letters are in use? I recall doing some sort of drive mapping unsuccessfully on my camera to try to get some pictures back a while ago, and I'm not sure if I changed something else then. I've also used software like MagicISO in the past to run virtual drives, but they are all disabled (I've always disabled them when not in use), and the software is long uninstalled.
I plugged in my Backup Plus Portable to this same computer, and a similar thing happened, but the device did show up under Disk Management, but without a letter. I assigned a letter and autorun ran and the drive showed up in Windows Explorer.
I plugged in my Backup Plus Desktop to my laptop, and it worked the first time I did it. I then proceeded to use the Seagate DiscWizard to try to identify my drive in my desktop. I clicked on "Add new disc," selected the drive, selected the "MBR layout" initialization process, and created a new partition as part of this process. I got a message stating something like "There may be important data on this disk crucial to proper functioning," but since I read this suggestion elsewhere to try to identify the drive, I proceeded to do it, anyway. At this point, I did not know that I can assign a new drive letter, so I did not assign a non-default one via the options.
Did I end up erasing some crucial data to make the drive run properly? The reason I ask is because the Backup Plus Desktop is no longer showing up in the laptop, but it did the first time as I mentioned previously. I'm not sure if it is related. The drive still shows up in Device Manager, but not in Disk Management, which is exactly the issue on my desktop. Also, I tried installing DiscWizard again, and the installation was successful, so the program did recognize the drive, but then it gave me an error that said "Failed to read from sector '-387,938,129' of hard disc '2'. I then tried to partition it as a GPT as a final resort, and the software gave me the same error. I was able to ignore the error and got the message that the process completed "successfully."
What are my options at this point?
