wooter43

Help! My external harddrive, Seagate, will not connect with my computer. I need a suggestion as to where I may send it for repair. Over 3000 photos are contained.

St3v3M Loc: 35,000 feet

Double-check the cables are connected and the power supply plugged in
Try a different USB connection on your computer
Try a Powered USB Hub
Try another computer

Jay Pat Loc: Round Rock, Texas, USA

Very good suggestions and welcome to the forum!!!!
Pat

Stormaster Loc: Alvin Texas

Also make sure that no more than ONE USB device is plugged in. That can sometimes cause a conflict.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Wooter - once you get sorted out - here is a recommendation. Stay away from inexpensive, prepackaged, multi terabyte hard drives. These are not at all reliable for two reasons - drive build quality and poor passive cooling. Put simply, they get hot and become unreliable and/or cease to function. I always recommend buying enterprise-level hard drives and installing them in small portable enclosures that have USB 3 connectivity (provided your computer has USB 3), and active cooling - a small fan - to keep things nice and cool. I recently made up a few of these for a friend - I used Western Digital RE drives (though Seagate Constellations would have been ok as well), and a small $35 single drive case with fan from Rosewill The 2 TB WD drives were $180 and come with a 5 yr warranty.

Drive recovery can be expensive, but if the drive is mechanically ok, it could be just the MBR (master boot record), or the partition table that has become corrupted. Windows operating systems will format drives with multiple copies of each, and recovery software can fix those kinds of problems.

Your local computer guy should be able to help you with all of this. Like car mechanics, just make sure you go to a legit guy with a reputation for not ripping people off.

In the future, makes sure you have at least two copies of your data - because drives do break.

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

Another suggestion is to re-download and install you drivers from the computer's Customer Service website. Sometimes, USB drivers get corrupted or need to be updated. This happens after some Automatic OS Updates.

I would plug some other device into the USB port and see if it's recognized to check the port's proper functionality. At least this confirms that the port is functioning and your USB drivers are operational. Remember...BLUE insert is USB 3.0 and WHITE insert is USB 1 or 2.

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

The external hard drives are only a regular hard drive in a box with the electronics to convert the SATA interface to USB. An inexpensive solution is first to check all cables to make sure they are plugged in properly. If they are, you can buy a new box from Tigerdirect.com or Newegg.com for about $30. All it takes is a screwdriver.

Of course if the drive itself is bad, that's different. In fact it is important to remember that 5+% of all drives fail in the first year and by three years over 11% have failed, so backup, backup, backup.