Resolved Seagate external HD not recognized?

Hello all. My wife and I have Windows xP runnung on our Gateway and all of our digital photos (as well as most of our saved files) are on our backup HD - a Seagate (I don't know the exact model). We had both our backup hd and our main crash at the same time. Since then we have been unable to access information from our Seagate external hd. We bought a Gateway netbook to make sure it was the "extra" hd and not the one in the Gateway desktop...and it appears to be. Both the machines recognize the Seagate - they both show it to be connected, and working correctly (with x amount of memory used, x amount available).
Our problem is that now the PC doesn't recognize the Seagate hd. I have read in this forum and others that renaming the drive works but we are unable to for some reason and I'm like ? All of our other network directories are able to be renamed, just not the one allocated to the Seagate. It doesn't even show that the Seagate is allocated a name to begin with. Any suggestions? My wife, as you may imagine is very anxious since just about every photo of our 7 year old is on that hd. Any information would be greatly appreciated!!

JC
Texas is hot. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

Hi from an often, very warm Aus.

Get the testing utilities from the Seagate website.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/

I had an external drive lose it's partition information when I disconnected it before the computer had completely shut down. I did some recovery techniques, but ran out of time and since they were only backups I stopped trying and repartitioned the drive. Edit: Moral of the story, seems you know, always have it in two places. I suggest burning onto DVDs is a good "hard copy ".

You might have more success at recovery if you can take the HDD out of the case and connect it into a desktop computer. It will depend on if the HDD uses an IDE or SATA connection and if IDE, whether it is a 3.5 or 2.5" HDD. If it uses eSATA, dont bother, eSATA is the same as connecting it to the motherboard.

Matt
PS Do some research about recovery. If I am talking above your experience level, let me know. Recovery can be complicated unless you hand it over to a pay-for file recovery company. You seem to be able to have the HDD appear in Windows OK, it might not be a very hard problem to solve. For drive information, are you looking in Disk Management?

 

Thank you, mattman, for your reply. I'm going to get to my computer a little later this morning to explain step by step what I've done and what I see so that perhaps I'll be able to give you and everyone else a full account.

 

Its usually worthwhile trying to determine why your drives crashed in the first place.
You say:
We had both our backup hd and our main crash at the same time.

Now, I reckon its next to impossible to have two hard drives crash, at the same time, from independent faults. Which makes me think its common component, like a drive controller on the motherboard.

The best thing to do, is remove each drive and see if you can read the (a) the partitions and then (b) the data directory on another computer. If you can read the directory, can you read the files? If you can, your disk or disks are OK.

I keep stand alone USB box able to handle both IDE and SATA cables plus, specifically to test hard drives. Just plug the USB port into a spare computer and see if your drives are recognised.

I think stand alone back up drives, though very popular, are tempting fate. I prefer to back up onto RAID banks so I get two back up images for the work involved in one. It worth considering when you get this problem ironed out.

Best of luck with it.

 

Thanks for the reply,

This is his wife, the one who discovered the problem. Both drives didn't crash at the same time, or main computer crashed and then when I got it back up and working and plugged in the back up drive it wasn't showing up in Windows Explorer.

I followed several different suggestions like, replace USB cable, plug directly into the wall, download and use Tweek, change the drive file name in disk management.

Bingo, here is where our problem is....
When I try to change the drive name in disk management the only option available after right click is "help ". But when I choose the "c" drive and right click it has the change drive name option. I am not sure what to do and how to get to change or add the drive name.

I would do recovery, but my skills are just so so and have no idea how to go about doing it without serious help.
As far as paying someone to get the info off this drive I would be willing to do but I know it is VERY expensive and money is a problem. If anyone could help me figure this out I would appriciate it, our 7 year olds whole life is on there. We had it on both the main computer and also on the external drive, I just never expected both to croak at the same time. Learned my lesson, will always back up to online server or hard copy from now on.

Thank you so much,
Robin

 

Thanks for the idea of looking into recovery. I found a program on Seagates web site that recovered all the info off the drive!!!

I couldn't be happier!

Thank you sooo much!!