Recover data from external hard drive

[FirstClass]

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB external hard drive that used to work perfectly fine, but a few days ago, it started to not work properly. It can be ejected, but it is not found in file explorer.

I opened disk management (diskmgmt.msc) but it shows it as unallocated and only shows 3.86GB of space. If I right click the box, the options for New Simple Volume, New Spanned Volume, and New Striped Volume are all grayed out and cannot be selected. My question is, is there any way to make the hard drive work properly without having to reformat it? I really need to recover the files inside the hard drive. Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!

[another random person]

4 minutes ago, FirstClass said:

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The exact same thing happened to me with my older Seagate external drive. I tried everything but none of it worked so I ended up shelling out a hundred or so for drive recovery by a data recovery store.

[FirstClass]

32 minutes ago, another random person said:

The exact same thing happened to me with my older Seagate external drive. I tried everything but none of it worked so I ended up shelling out a hundred or so for drive recovery by a data recovery store.

I really hope there's a solution without having to pay more than a hundred dollars just to recover my data...

[another random person]

4 minutes ago, FirstClass said:

I really hope there's a solution without having to pay more than a hundred dollars just to recover my data...

I personally couldn't find one but hopefully there should be.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

You could try run Chkdsk, here is a tutorial for win7 that should work in later versions http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/433-disk-check.html

you could do a smart test for physical failures but i dont think its physical failure.

heres a bunch of tools on technet relating to disk management that are alternatives that show disk partitions https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046

interesting ones are NTFSinfo, and DiskExt