Laptop cannot read external harddrive. Please help!

Guys, I am desperate, I do not know what to do. My external drive refuses to be recognized by my laptops. Everything was going well, I bought this harddrive about 3 months ago. It is a Seagate Backup Plus 5TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive STDT5000100. Today when I tried to copy files to it, everything slowed down to a crawl. I thought Windows had crashed so I rebooted my laptop and now it can no longer recognize my external drive. Where the drive used to be is just "I:" and when I double-click it, a message pops up saying "Incorrect parameter". I fear that my drive has died on me...

It has happened to me once before in November 2013 with another drive and I had to use DriveSavers in California to extract the data, but it costed me over 1000$. The video were eclectic and of high sentimental values, so I paid up. Now it has probably happened again. But I cannot afford to pay a second time... Can anyone help me save my data? It would be really appreciated!

 

So if/when you get this data recovered, you're going to get another drive and have a backup copy of your data, right?

Fool me once (twice in this case)...


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If you are **extremely** lucky, the problem is that the drive itself is fine, and the problem is that the controller chip on the external drive enclosure is the point of failure. You can trsr this by trying to mount the hard drive into another external enclosure, or one of those bare SATA-to-USB adapter cables you can get for $8-$10.

If you are unlucky, the problem is on the drive itself. If you absolutely need the data, time to call a drive recovery service.

No matter what happens, for god sakes, start putting your critical data in a RAID-1 mirroring configuration. You can buy Vantec Nexstar dual-drive enclosures that support RAID-1 mirroring for a little under $100… plus the cost of two identical hard drives to put in there. RAID-1 is your best bet against hard drive hardware failures. I think by now you've learned lesson #2 in data protection... every storage device *WILL* eventually fail. It is just a matter of when it fails.

Lesson #1 is backups, backups, backups. Even I'd you get a mirrored RAID configuration, have backups. (Accidentally deleting a file in a mirrored disk configuration only means you delete that file twice). If this is truly data you cannot afford to lose, you need 3 copies of this data. Local live data you work with, local backup copy, and off site backup copy.

If you can't afford to lose this data, then find a way to afford to protect it.

 

if its only 3 months old i would contact seagate support for advice.

you could also try some of these https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=seagate+hard+drive+not+showing+up