External to Internal Drive problem.

[Rhyzak]

I have a "Seagate Expansion Drive 2TB". About two or three days ago I guess it stopped working as I have only realized today that it just isn't turning on at all or connecting no matter what I do. I tried other cables as I have a Western Digital External, a USB hub and phone connectors as well.

I took my friends advice to open it up and plug it in internally as he said the board for it may have just died out. It seems he may have been correct as I have connected it internally with SATA 6GB/s cable and the power cable to the PSU. It spins up fine while also connecting with no problem.

The only problem I have now is that it says I need to format it to access it. Under device manager it now goes by its model name "ST2000DM001-1E6164" instead of its original device name "Seagate Expansion Desk SCSI Disk Device"

Here it is listed as Drive "( E: )". Before it was listed as Drive "( I: )".

http://i.imgur.com/5Vd2sNB.png

I am currently at a loss at the moment and have over 1.6TB of data on it that means a lot to me. (Family pictures, videos, photoshop files, backup files etc.)

Is there anyway to make it go back to been its normal drive at all?

Edit #1: I forgot to mention that when it was still in its external case. I plugged it into the front USB 3.0 panel on the PC case and it disconnected all the USB devices except the ones not connected to the USB 3.0 card. The USB 3.0 card is slotted into the x1 PCI-Express slot on the motherboard. I unplugged it to see if the others would reconnect but they did not. I had to turn the PC off and re-slot the card for them to be able to reconnect.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH Community, @Rhyzak!

Unfortunately, some external HDDs tend to be configured in different LBAs than internal SATA drives. This is why your system is requiring you to format the drive in order to be able to use it via SATA. I'd recommend you attempt to connect the drive externally again through a SATA-to-USB cable or another third-party enclosure to see if you will be able to access the data then. If you experience the same issue, I'd strongly recommend you consider turning to a professional data recovery company for assistance as they are your best bet on getting the files back. It might also be a good idea to use the HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic tool to check up on the health and SMART stats of the drive.

You could also try putting the HDD back in its original case and plug it to another computer to check if you'd be able to access your files from there.
Make sure you back everything up as soon as you can access it! Having multiple backups/copies of your files are the surest way to avoid data loss. Always remember that "backup" means that you have your data stored in at least two (2) locations. Moving data from your system drive to an external hard drive is not a backup, unless there is already a duplicate of the file on a different drive.

Hope these steps help you. Keep me posted with the troubleshooting, you are doing an amazing job with it!
SuperSoph_WD