Hey all, total newb here so appreciate any bad news you can give me. Also, please forgive my total lack of knowledge on what to call these parts.
I have a Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STGX2000400) and the drive recently stopped working. First I noticed that I would have to switch USB cables, thinking it was a faulty cable. Then I would start twisting/bending the cable to get it to start spinning, then applying pressure where the cable meets the drive...that's when I started backing up what was on the drive but I didn't get everything. Then I couldn't get it to power up at all.
I have two identical drives...so I took the failing one out of the casing, realized the physical usb port had broken. I opened up the good one and swapped the power port piece. That allowed me to fire the faulty drive up again, but when I plugged it in, it wouldn't show up in Explorer. But it would show up in the quick start menu as BUP Slim. I googled lots of different fixes and tried them, like loading device manager and uninstalling the device, or searching to update the drivers, rebooting etc. The drive spins, the computer is acknowledging it is there, but it just won't let me open it up in Explorer.
One more thing I tried, was taking the blue piece off the good drive and swapping it with the faulty drive. The results for the faulty drive were the same. When I tried to fire back up the good drive with the faulty drives blue piece, it would do the same thing I described above (for the drive that is working). To me that tells me something is wrong on that blue piece...but putting the good one on the faulty one didn't get the faulty one to work so maybe not. I put everything back the way it was and the good one still fires up correctly.
Any ideas? Pics attached.