Help with Seagate 300gb External

[Jiggytrav]

I have a Seagate 300GB USB external hard drive that I bought from Best Buy in December 2005. It has worked flawlessly until today when I noticed that the drive was no longer listed in Explorer. I thought maybe it had shut itself off but the blue power light was on and it should have been detected.

So I tried the following things to get it working again:

1) Unplugged the USB cable and plugged it back in. Usually, this will give that audible sound in XP that alerts you to a device being added or removed, but there was none.

2) Turned the power off to the drive, waited a minute, then turned it back on. Still nothing. The power light comes on and I can hear the drive power on (sounds fine), but it does not detect in Windows.

3) Removed the USB cable and tried it in another port. Confirmed the ports were working with other devices, but still nothing. Even tried a different USB cable.

4) Removed the drive from this PC and plugged it into my son's PC. Nothing.

5) Plugged it into my Xbox 360 (it works with external drives too) but still nothing.

At this point, I have concluded that the USB port on the back of the drive itself must have gone bad... That's the only thing I can think of, but I wanted to run it by you guys first before getting warranty service on it.

I suppose there is probably a way to open up the casing and hooking it up via IDE or SATA or something, but that would probably void the warranty.

If it is bad, do you think they would fix the USB port or just send me a new drive? There is some semi-sensitive data on the drive, so what should I do? It's a backup drive, so I do have most of the data on 2 other drives on my PC, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong with the storage on the drive itself.

Thanks!

[DougL]

Hi Jiggytrav

If you can open up the caddie without invalidating the warranty then you could take it out of the caddie remove the USB connection and try plugging it in to a spare IDE port to see if you can access the files. If the drive is still in warranty then it may be best to return for a new one. My only concern with returning drives is that the chance of seeing your data again may be nil.

Doug

[Mesaeus]

If there's data on that hard drive that's worth more to you than the price of your hard disk, then open it up and try plugging the hard drive in a desktop. There's a good chance it's the hard drive that's broken but at least try to get your data back; like DougL said there's every chance your data will be wiped if you return it. The warranty typically only gets voided when they can see that you opened it (i.e. you broke some seal sticker to get it open). If there's a way to open it without changing anything, nobody will be the wiser about your DIY data rescue :D

[Jiggytrav]

Thanks for the tips guys! After I got to thinking about it a bit, I remembered that the particular drive I have also has a Firewire port. So I dug out the Firewire cable from the box, plugged it in and viola! The drive works perfectly fine with the Firewire connection but the USB port must have died on it. I had an extra Firewire port in the back of my PC anyway, so I'll just continue using the drive this way now. I suppose I could still exchange the drive for a new one since it's still under warranty, but I don't think it's really worth messing with now, do you?

Thanks again...

[ricoman]

Save your data while you have a chance and exchange the drive.