PC unable to detect Seagate hard drive from My Computer, Disk Manager, or BIOS

[billwilliams89]

Hi, I'm currently attempting to help a friend recover some data from an external hard drive. It's a Seagate Expansion 1 TB (model SRD00F1). When I plugged it into my PC I heard the classic connecting noise of a USB and my PC attempted to download drivers, but failed to do so. It should also be noted that the hard drive lit up and I could hear the drive spinning. I tried using a different cord and that didn't help. I tried different USB ports and 2 different computers and that didn't help either. I took it apart and removed the bridge inside and then plugged it into a laptop and a couple different desktops. I still was never able to get it to be recognizable in My Computer, disk manager, device manager, or Bios. At this point I'm going to assume the hard drive is pretty well dead, but I was wondering if there is any other way to attempt to recover the data off of it. I don't really care to fix the hard drive itself, just looking to get the data off of it if at all possible. Thanks for any advice.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there billwilliams89,

Unfortunately, the drive is most probably dead. As the drive is not recognized even by BIOS, you will not be able to access it with any software tool. You can't be sure what is wrong with the drive.
In case the data is crucial, I would suggest you to contact a data recovery company. If you decide to go with that, you shouldn't open up the drive as you will expose the platters to dust contaminated environment.

Mechanical drives could just fail, even without a warning. This is why, you should always keep the data that you can't afford to loose stored on at least two places.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD