My problem is similar and also very complicated.

[gearwolfen]

I was studying C# on my PC. I was also simultaneously attempting to reinstall visual basic to my external HD as it didn't completely install the last time I tried to install it. Suddenly my pc froze I waited about 40 mins for the issue to resolve itself to no avail. So I then hard reset it (held the power button until it shut off) and when I started it back up the pc refuses to show my external hard-drive. I have been trolling the web trying to find a solution to the issue. When i go to the device manager my PC recognizes the device is present and even Identifies it by name (Seagate expansion scsi device) but it does not show up under my PC as it usual. It doesn't show up at all. I cannot access it. I did a basic google search of the issue and found a dew solutions but none worked the most promising of the solutions showed me something new that has me worried. I was told to download miniTool partition Wizard to attemp to repair a partition of the drive that ma have been damaged during the heard reset due to the fact something was still being written on the drive. And when I ran the program and looked for my other drive it shows up as "Read Only" 0.0GB. It's a 1TB hard drive and everything that I have been working on is on it. all the sprites I made all my PDF's everything and I don't know how to recover it if anyone has any advice or help or solutions please share them because I completely lost and I don't want to lose all my stuff.

 

[JaredDM]

The drive has likely had a hardware failure. Given that it's a Seagate, I'd suspect that it's developed a lot of bad sectors which lead it to stall during the install process. Then, it probably got stuck in an auto-reallocation loop and isn't responding to basic ATA commands (including the one that checks it's ID and capacity). Unfortunately you're not likely to be able to recover it yourself.

If it's still in the external enclosure, you may try taking it out and direct SATA connect it to a computer to see if it'll properly ID and show capacity in BIOS/UEFI. If it does, the you should try cloning it in Linux using ddrescue (ddrescue tutorial here). However I suspect it'll just continue to show 0.0GB capacity, or even just prevent the BIOS from posting and you'll be looking at a blank screen.

Your best bet, assuming your data is worth $300-500, would be to get it to a professional data recovery place. At this point recovery may not cost that much, but if you push it by trying a million things that price will climb fast.