Having trouble with external harddrives.

[Silentcrisis]

Hello - after crawling across the web for answers, I'm still stumped as to what's going on.

I'm running Vista Home Premium on an HP laptop, had it for about a year.

I recently purchased a 320gb Seagate 3.5" harddrive, along with a new rather expensive external closure to go with it. So I could use it as an external harddisk and all - now, everything was going fine the first week. I stopped using it for a few days; I plug it back in, and nothing happens. How could this be? All I did was stick a few gigs of data onto the drive..I didn't bash it around or anything, kept it in a very safe, secure location away from sunlight and all that.

I can't see the drive under "My Computer", but I'm able to see it under Disk Management; which, lists the drive as 'Unreadable'. There's also a health cross icon on it, if that means anything. Right-clicking does not reveal anything but 'Properties'. I'm unable to format the drive, it seems. I don't think it has anything to do with assigning it a letter, either, because I already did that when I formatted the drive so Vista could recognize it. I've already tried using different USB ports, using different power cables, different USB connectors..Made sure everything was snug and in the right places.

This 'Unreadable' problem has been happening to two of my other external closures as well, all of which have the same 'Unreadable' status. I have a hunch that my OS is corrupt and is fracking over the externals somehow, but I don't know. I've tried disk utilities, but none of them can recognize the drives. I plugged the Seagate into a computer to see if it could be recognized, but no cigar. I'm at my wit's end here. I even tried the drive on a comp running Ubuntu, but it doesn't recognize the drive; says something like 'Failed to mount'. =/

Any comments, suggestions would be great. Thanks, hoping there's still something I can do..I mean, all of the drives were working fine for a while, and then they just..died. Both IDE and SATA types, too.

 

[rozar]

Is it possible that you unplugged it while it was writing data? You might have gotten a dleayed write failure notice in windows too.

 

[dallasjoh]

Try downloading Seagates "SeaTools™ - diagnostic software" and run it on the 320gb Seagate drive and see if that will help.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/

 

[Silentcrisis]

Thanks for the suggestion, tried out "SeaTools" - and it says "Test Unavailable". Can't even query details on it. I see a model number, but that's about it. What the hell happened here?

 

[rozar]

Can you see this drive on other machines? Or is just the one?

 

[Silentcrisis]

Tried hooking it into a comp running Ubuntu via USB. Says the drive 'failed to mount' or something to that effect.

Just tried the method of re-installing drivers for it and then rebooting, but no success. Now it's listed under Device Manager as 'USB Device'. Property description tab says it's a "disk drive", but that's it. Under Disk Management, it's still listed as an "Unknown" "Unreadable" drive. All I can do is right-click and look at Properties, which has nothing useful under it..

 

[rozar]

Are you sure the external device is not bad and the drive is ok? I would try to test the drive in another enclosure or connected directly to a computer if possible.

 

[Silentcrisis]

Aye, that's what I thought, too - directly connected to another computer, still doesn't work. And the external isn't bad, I'm sure of that. :/ As I said before, it worked for a while and then just died on me. This has happened to all of my external drives..