I have a 320GB Expansion 2.5" external hard drive that when you plug in, the drive spins up and starts beeping once every couple of seconds. After this the drive spins down, stops beeping and that's it after about 20 seconds. The status LED remains lit up in green. The drive doesn't show up in My Computer and nor does it show up in Disk Management. I've tried a couple of different USB leads and 3 different machines and all with the same result. There are no unusual sounds from the hard drive. What could be wrong and how can I get the drive working to recover my data?
The PC recognises a device has been plugged in and installs the drivers for it but that's the only sign the system recognises the drive.
If your drive is powered from the USB port, try using a Y-cable, if not already.
A single USB port is current limited to 500mA. Your drive requires around 850mA to during spin up, and about 400mA thereafter. Sometimes you need to pick up power from two USB ports via a Y-cable.
I tried running Seagate's DIY Recovery Software last night. It recognises the hard drive. I did start scanning it but it was going at a very slow pace. I didn't sit the test out though because the machine I was on didn't have a large enough drive to recover all of my files so that will be something for tonight to try on another machine.
Fingers crossed.
I'm really annoyed though that when I emailed Seagate asking for support on it, keeping in mind it's only a few weeks old, the response seemed to be a generic style email advertising their data recovery service! Last time I buy a Seagate drive. It was the faith people used to have in their products and customer service many years ago that made me start using Seagate but I can see QC and customer service have gone down hill.
I'm really annoyed though that when I emailed Seagate asking for support on it, keeping in mind it's only a few weeks old, the response seemed to be a generic style email advertising their data recovery service!
Well, to be fair, you told the agent what troubleshooting steps you had already taken, and to your credit they are pretty much all the steps that the agent could have suggested. The only thing left to do was to suggest data recovery, since you did not keep a backup. I'm sorry that there wasn't anything more for him to tell you, but that is really all there was to say.
