Seagate Hard Drive Won't Load, PC Slows Down

[kingjim9]

Hello everyone,
I'm going through some old hard drives I had laying around from old PC's over the years using a SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 cable. I've encountered an issue with one drive though. This drive won't load and the PC seems to struggle while trying to load this drive. Now to give you a back story...I had this exact same drive connected last week on Wednesday and went through it perfectly fine at first, though it did seem to go slow when browsing the directory at some times.

Now when I connect the drive, I can hear the classic windows USB Device plugged in sound, I can see the drive in My Computer and it is assigned a letter, in my case E:. What is missing though is the green bar that indicates how full the drive is. When I double click it, I just get the blue circle that spins and spins. The same occurs when trying to right click. Any windows explorer related task runs extremely slow during this and lags, though I can open other applications such as firefox and proceed like normal. Eventually I'll get the "Windows Explorer has Stopped Working" error message and restart windows explorer.

I found a similar forum on this here: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3307374/external-hard-drive-wont-load-slows.html

So following this advice I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 17.04 to a DVD and ran it in preview mode, I connected the drive and encountered the same issue....Ubuntu detected the drive, but when clicking on it, the drive just sat at "Loading...". The only real difference was that in Ubuntu there were no lag or slow performance issues, everything did seem to go fine.

I also downloaded an ISO file of Seagate's SeaTools and booted from that CD, though the utility couldn't even see the Seagate drive when in the utility. It only saw my laptop's main internal drive. Though I'm not sure if the utility can connect via USB when in DOS mode? Perhaps someone could verify this should have worked or maybe I need to do more to see the drive connected via the USB to IDE adapter.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get access to this drive again? There's really only a few files I'd like to grab and then I just want to sanitize the disk and recycle the drive.

 

[DSzymborski]

If you can still read the drive, as appears to be the case, you should try software recovery solutions such as EaseUS or Recuva. Beyond that, recovery options are mainly professional data recovery firms that dissect the hard drive in a clean environment, which can get pricey. Basically, the prime strategy for recovering data from dying hard drives is, unfortunately, not to need to do it at all by regular backups of the data you care about losing.