Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive Not Recognized By Computer

[phoenix321]

Hi,

My 3 terabyte Seagate Backup Plus external hard drive is no longer working properly.
My external hard drive's light lights up and I can hear that it's on. I'm running Windows 10 on a laptop.

I opened up Device Manager and, after expanding "Universal Serial Bus Controllers" I see "Unknown USB Device (Set Address Failed)". I assume this message refers to my external hard drive that's not working.

Another message I've gotten is this one: "One of the USB devices attached to your computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it".

I opened up Disk Management but my external hard drive doesn't appear there at all.

Today I noticed that my external hard drive was making some squeaky sounds, but only very rarely and I only noticed it doing this today.

What should I do? My goal is to get my computer to recognize the external hard drive and, if that doesn't work, to save the data on it somehow.

If I got the kind of cable that plugs into an external hard drive could I just connect the drive to my computer using that and get the information off of my external hard drive that way?

Thank you.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there phoenix321,

Unfortunately, these weird sounds could indicate that there's something physically wrong with your drive.

I believe your safest bet for recovering the data would be to contact a data recovery company.

Apart from that, you can try a couple of things:
- Attach the drive with another cable to a different port. You can even attach it to another computer. You will rule out a possible connection/driver related issue.
- Some users take the drive out of the enclosure in similar cases, in order to attach the drive internally. Keep in mind that this may not work due to various reasons and will void the warranty.

What kind of cable are you talking about?

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[phoenix321]

Hi there phoenix321,

Unfortunately, these weird sounds could indicate that there's something physically wrong with your drive.

I believe your safest bet for recovering the data would be to contact a data recovery company.

Apart from that, you can try a couple of things:
- Attach the drive with another cable to a different port. You can even attach it to another computer. You will rule out a possible connection/driver related issue.
- Some users take the drive out of the enclosure in similar cases, in order to attach the drive internally. Keep in mind that this may not work due to various reasons and will void the warranty.

What kind of cable are you talking about?

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm not exactly sure what the cable is called but for some reason I think it's called a SATA cable.

I think I'll try some of your suggestions.

"- Some users take the drive out of the enclosure in similar cases, in order to attach the drive internally. Keep in mind that this may not work due to various reasons and will void the warranty."

I think this is what I had been thinking of doing. If I took the drive out of the enclosure, maybe I could bypass something in the drive that isn't working? This is what I believe the SATA cable would be used for.

 

[D_Know_WD]

The only thing you can bypass is a faulty enclosure. If the HDD inside is failing, this will not help.

If the assume that the device has no proprietary connectors, you may be able to attach it with SATA & power cables.
Make sure the device is to hardware encrypted.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD