External drive - red light stays on and computer frozen
500 Gb Seagate laptop external drive with Phillips enclosure worked fine for a couple of months. Now when I plug it into the USB port on the computer (XP Pro) the red light and green light cycle continuously as soon as the USB device is recognised. 'My Computer' freezes up in search mode. Eventually the red light goes out and I can access the computer management 'local storage' screen and the external drive partitions are listed as healthy. If I try to open the drive from the local storage screen the red light goes back on and I get 'I/O error' message. To pull the external drive I shut down the computer and the light goes to green and stays green and I pull the USB cable. Is the drive fried? Can I recover my files from it? Ta very much for anyone's help!!
Computers & Internet - Western Digital - 320GB MyBook External USB 2.0 Hard Drive
Answers & Comments
If the computer is going ballistic when you plug in your external drive that is an indicator that something is fubar with your Seagate drive. And a data retrieval asap is in order.
Remove the drive from your external case and hook it up directly to your regular computer as a slave drive and see if you can get your data off of it. Hopefully its condition will allow your main drive to bootup , then you can go into windows explorer, and transfer all of your needed files to a usb stick or perhaps your main drive if you have the room. It is not uncommon for a drive to be so bad that even its mere presence will not allow your main drive to boot up!!!!!! Not good. In a case like that you might try to install the drive in a docking station and then hook it up to an up and running computer - you might get lucky and get access to its innards. But do not be surprised if you cannot. Hard drives are like humans - they are all destined to die - you just do not know when.
If you have bad sectors on the drive that are responsible for its condition, you might try to run check disk on it to repair the bad sectors but knowing that if it locates and repairs bad sectors the data in the bad sector may not be saved. But anything you save is better than nothing so it is worth the risk. Then after the retrieval you can run a low level format on the drive - this procedure will erase everything on the drive in addition to permanently blocking out any and all bad sectors on the drive. If it works it will be like a brand new drive.
When drives are manufactured nada is perfect and they always have more capacity that the stated amount. When the low level format is run on new drive, the bad sectors are blocked out and replaced by "surplus" sectors so that stated capacity is met.
Ready for some "fun"?