Seagate External Drive not showing up

[Davie Mac]

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. 

[Spotty]

1 minute ago, Davie Mac said:

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. 

Can you open Disk Management and take a screenshot of what is shown there with the HDD plugged in to the system.

[TheReal_ist]

The real question is why are using a HDD as your ONE AND ONLY drive for your PC. U boot from it, u store your backup shit on it.

 

My dude an SSD costs like 20 bucks at 120gb. U use that for your OS boot and make a folder for important backups like tax docs, passwords, logins, etc. U can then change where your PC saves things which is pretty easy. 

 

U shouldn't have been using a HDD for anything but backups way back in 2017 now its even more paramount u switch. I mean come on u lost most of your shit because of it. Perfect time to switch don't ya think............

[Excalibur20]

I have a problem where my computer doesn't want to recognize any external hard drives. I know the hard drives aren't broken because they are recognized by my laptop. None of the drives appear in file explorer, however, one of them does show up in disk management. When the drives were brand new and I plugged them in they worked perfectly just as they do on my laptop. Not sure if it's the USB ports or a driver issue (even though the drives don't need any to work) or if Windows is just being a bitch. Would love some help.

[Davie Mac]

On 5/4/2019 at 9:45 AM, Spotty said:

Can you open Disk Management and take a screenshot of what is shown there with the HDD plugged in to the system.

Sorry it took a couple of days to get to this...I clicked on properties and went through the tabs. I also clicked on scanned for hardware changes and it the drive disappeared from device manager but it launched a new window with some stuff and I took pics of that if that would be helpful. Appreciate all help!

[Spotty]

@Davie Mac Can you open Disk Management and see if the drive shows up there? If it's showing up in device manager it should be showing up in Disk Management, but you might be able to view more information about the drive.

To open Disk Management either;

• Search "Disk Management" in the task bar
• Run: 'diskmgmt.msc'
• Right click on This PC > Select Manage > Disk Management

Should look something like this...

Spoiler

You may also be able to use a program called SeaTools from the Seagate website which will let you scan the drive for errors, but this will only work if it will detect the drive.

 

On 5/5/2019 at 12:41 AM, Davie Mac said:

The drive spins, the computer is acknowledging it is there, but it just won't let me open it up in Explorer. 

Does it show any information about the drive like its capacity or is the information blank? Does it give any error messages or does it just get stuck with the spinning loading icon?

[Davie Mac]

On 5/9/2019 at 2:45 PM, Spotty said:

@Davie Mac Can you open Disk Management and see if the drive shows up there? If it's showing up in device manager it should be showing up in Disk Management, but you might be able to view more information about the drive.

To open Disk Management either;

• Search "Disk Management" in the task bar
• Run: 'diskmgmt.msc'
• Right click on This PC > Select Manage > Disk Management

Should look something like this...

  Hide contents

You may also be able to use a program called SeaTools from the Seagate website which will let you scan the drive for errors, but this will only work if it will detect the drive.

 

Does it show any information about the drive like its capacity or is the information blank? Does it give any error messages or does it just get stuck with the spinning loading icon?

So it shows up as Disk 1 Unknown...I confirmed by unplugging and that disk went away. It says not initialized. When I right click and select initialize, it gives two options, but both have error messages. pics attached.