External Hard Drive Not Working

[Wulffy]

My mom has a Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive 1TB external hard drive. After a month or so it stopped showing up on the list of devices and drives. Also, its activity light turns on when you plug it in but turns off after a few seconds. I thought it might have been because she always unplugs it without pressing the eject button. Could you guys please help me? If I'm missing any info tell me.

 

Thanks

[Tedster]

Unplugging without ejecting usually can only cause data corruption, from my knowledge.

 

Is there any visible physical damage? Any sound when you plug it in?

 

Hopefully it's just the enclosure that's damaged so you could put the disk in a different one and find that everything's fine with the drive itself.

[rkendall94]

I've done a few "repairs" on them at the shop I work at. Alot of the times the actual enclosure fails. So if you have a way to take it out and put it in a hard drive docking station you may be able to atleast get the data off. Is it a regular external drive or does it have a large enclosure?

[Wulffy]

Unplugging without ejecting usually can only cause data corruption, from my knowledge.

 

Is there any visible physical damage? Any sound when you plug it in?

 

Hopefully it's just the enclosure that's damaged so you could put the disk in a different one and find that everything's fine with the drive itself.

 

I've done a few "repairs" on them at the shop I work at. Alot of the times the actual enclosure fails. So if you have a way to take it out and put it in a hard drive docking station you may be able to atleast get the data off. Is it a regular external drive or does it have a large enclosure?

 

No physical damage, no sound, it is regular sized. I just wen to disk management and saw that there was a drive without a letter assigned to it. I just looked up what that could mean and it said to give it a letter so I'm trying to do that now. I'll write back soon.

[rkendall94]

Drive could be failing if it shows up as a drive that is not initialized. If it lets you assign a letter and format it download and run seatools on it to see if the drive is failing.

[Wulffy]

No physical damage, no sound, it is regular sized. I just wen to disk management and saw that there was a drive without a letter assigned to it. I just looked up what that could mean and it said to give it a letter so I'm trying to do that now. I'll write back soon.

I can't press "Change Drive Letter and Paths"  because it is in the gray writing that you cant click on.