Seagate Backup Plus

[Poororo]

Hello wonderful people of Tom's Hardware,

■ So my dad purchased a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus which had a problem sometime between 2013 and 2014. This required me to plug the hard drive on our desktop and run chkdsk(or probably diskpart). I remember chkdsk (or diskpart) had encountered something or probably was interrupted, this lead to the drive being unusable (won't appear in My Computer).

This week, I tried to make the drive work again, the drive is being recognized in Device Manager and appears in Control Panel. I downloaded Active@ Partition Manager to try and remake the drive's partition, but encountered an error that said something about the drive not being ready. At first the device showed a yellow icon(at control panel, which indicated some problems) and I troubleshooted the drive, after clicking apply fix it enabled the device then prompted restart.

After that the drive still appears in Active@ Partition Manager but now the "Initialize" option is greyed out , I tried reinstalling the drive from device manager but still no success. Trying to initialize through windows Disk Management says "The system cannot find the file specified".

EDIT: Before, the drive appears on Active@ P.M as Fixed disk and RAW, now it has SCSI Disk device.
EDIT AGAIN: Screenshots here, the seagate tool can't seem to detect the drive.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Poororo.

It sounds like the HDD might be in a bit of a bad shape. Would you please post some screenshots of what you see about the HDD in Disk Management, Device Manager and the partitioning tool you've mentioned? They might prove useful.
In the meantime you could go ahead and download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests, to see what's the situation with the drive. You could also try the drive with a different computer to see if you encounter the same problems.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

The fact that it's a Seagate unit doesn't bode well either. I've never had a Seagate drive yet that didn't fail just outside the warranty period.

I only buy WD externals now - - all three still going strong after five years.

 

[Poororo]

Edited the post to provide the screenshots

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Unfortunately, it really does look like it's on its way to fail. 🙁

As suggested, try the manufacturer's diagnostic tool, to see if you'd be able to test the drive for errors or at least check its SMART data. If it's not recognized you could also give it a go with some of the 3rd party tools from this article: https://www.lifewire.com/free-hard-drive-testing-programs-2626183.

Having in mind you can't initialize the drive with neither of the partition management tools you've tried and Disk Management, might mean that the HDD is gone for good and you might end up replacing it.