Seagate Backup Plus 4tb

Question

I have a seagate 4tb backup plus desktop external hard-drive. I use it to house a lot of college work, regular work files and a few movies etc. While it has been been plugged into my tv the past few days for the movies I noticed it starting to skip, freeze and then just crash freezing the tv with it. I removed the files that were added within the last month and all seemed well. Now its happened again. Yet again I removed the most recently added files and got 20mins into a show before the hard-drive began making odd noises then crashing. It now can't be detected on my laptop (Toshiba Satellite C-50-A 157) which runs Windows 8.1

It will show me something is connected via usb but nothing appears in the drives or elsewhere. I troubleshoote the issue and got told their were issues but nothing I could use to source an issue. I read online of people having issues on Windows 7 and others recommending seatools. My hard drive is under guarantee but Seagate wants me to get information through seatools first but the issue is when I run it, it freezes and goes unresponsive while checking the usb connections so I can't get any of the information they need.

Would any one have any idea of how to solve this issue.

I've tried all usb ports.
I've tried another hard drive in my laptop, which works perfectly.
I haven't been able to check on a different OS because all I have access to right now is Windows 8.1 until I upgrade my own laptop to Windows 10.

I figure I wont be able to get all my stuff back at the end of this and that formatting will be inevitable just hoping their is something that can save me from having to waste and resource nearly 3tb worth of data

Answer 1

Seagate offers an online data recovery software package that will look at your drive and tell you if the files are recoverable. If they are, the software will find your files for you, and then you pay a fee to have them restored. If they are not, then you are done, you have not spent any money, and you know your data is lost.

[Note: for non-US people that link does a weird country specific redirect that initially fails - you should then go back and click it again].

Answer 2

The symptoms you describe could also be bad sectors, in which I case I suggest you follow the route I described in this answer. Note that this answer emphasizes fixing the bad sectors first before doing any logical 'repair' of the file system.