Seagate External Hard Drive not showing up in My Computer

[TechStuey05]

Hey guys,

I have a 3TB USB 3.0 Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive which worked fine until very recently. The drive has data on it. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. When I plug the external hard drive into my PC it does not show up in my computer. It is showing up in Device Manager and it says that the drive is working properly. It won't show up in Seatools either.

The drive sometimes shows up in Disk Management but it says "Unknown" and "Not Initialized". I'm given no other option except it says "Offline". When I open Disk Management it sometimes asks me to initialize the disk as MBR or GPT.

When I click the option initialize Disk as GPT I see an error message saying "The System Cannot Find the File Specified". The external hard drive was originaly formated as GPT at least a year ago.

I booted off the Ubuntu Disk and connected the external hard drive when Ubuntu was loaded but the drive won't show up there. I uninstalled the driver software software in Device Manager but no effect.

I can safely remove the external hard drive from the PC. When I plug the external hard drive into the PC it sometimes install the driver software but it takes a long time to install the drivers for the drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Shockey]

Can you remove the drive without breaking the case and try a different external enclosure? Or just try the SATA port directly to your motherboard

 

[drescherjm]

Or just try the SATA port directly to your motherboard

This may not work. Some large external drives have 4K sectors when in an enclosure but 512 byte sectors when not so when you plug them into an sata port. This will show up as unformatted in windows.