My Seagate free agent goflex 1TB is not getting recognized in my windows 7 laptop.. It was working till yesterday. It is not showing up in device manager. Is there any way I can reinstall the driver? Or any better way to get it working again?
2 Answers
Before attempting to solve the problem, you have to determine its root.
There are only four possibilities:
Something is wrong with the computer.
This could be indeed a driver problem, a malfunctioning USB host controller, a bad BIOS setting, etc. The easiest way to troubleshoot this is connecting the device to a different computer.
Something is wrong with the USB cable.
Try a different cable.
Something is wrong with the enclosure.
If the drive isn't under warranty, you can open the enclosure and take out the HDD. Depending on the design, this may be possible without damaging the enclosure.
Something is wrong with the HDD itself.
If none of the above helps, this is the case.
The first three cases are easily fixable. If the HDD itself is failing, you're out of luck. Professional data recovery is required and, sadly, very expensive.
Along with Dennis's cases there's also the case when you file system might have been corrupted due to unsafe plugging of the drive to the devices.
This can be easily solved by plugging the device to some linux system (a live disk will work as well) and rewriting the file system on the device. If GUI is not accessible you can do this via terminal as well.
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As answers go, this is very generalised. How would you "rewrite the file system" on Linux. Please be more specific.– TogFeb 23, 2014 at 15:48
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Linux shell command? GUI? Which utility is easiest? Care to recommend a LiveCD version? Please remember, this user may never have used Linux or may not have access to a Linux PC.– TogFeb 23, 2014 at 15:56
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@tog sorry for skipping that. User can do this via rhe GUI from the live CD of Ububtu or any other Linux file system. Also format it to NTFS. Feb 23, 2014 at 15:59