USB ext 500GB Problem

I think this is the right forum, "Hardware Components" that is, But I have a 8-9 year old Seagate USB 500GB ext slim drive.

It was xfering/playing fine with movies and music stored on it, but now, although it lights up, it is not recognized by my laptop or desktop or a media device (MxqPro), where it had been feeding movies thru the MxqPro on to a television. (a possible CAUSE is my friend removed the drive while powered up, but I do that all the time with USB flash drive mem sticks on my laptop with no problems)

I'm using "Active File Recovery" software to analyze and hopefully repair/fix this problem but I'm not quite sure how to go about using the available tools/options to get this fixed.

One thing I notice is that the "Active File Recovery" software reports TWO 500gb partitions, when I know there is only one! How is that possible to have two 500gb partitions on a drive that is 500gb max? Obviously this has something to do with the problem! But how do I delete the one partition without wiping out all the data on the other when they are both the same 500gb drive?

See attached pics, and this was working fine for quite a while as external movie/music/data storage?

Any ideas?

 

are there important data?
if no, then just delete all partitions with Diskpart (build in in windows - cmd -> diskpart), and create new partition, format it.

 

https://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Please download CrystalMark, run the analysis on your external drive, and post the screenshot here.

 

bizsid, 366gb worth . . .
darker01, will do . . .

But why is there TWO partition tables?

 

darker01, CrystalDisk Mark does not see the SeaGate US B 500gb Ext drive! see pic

 

Can you check the pins on both the hard drive and on the adapter cable? God knows how much those pins endured for the past 8-9 years.
Also, when plugged in, does the drive whir normally, or do you hear any unusual clicking/scratching/high pitch noise?

 

This picture attached, is from Active Partition Recovery "partition scan" of the Ou(2) partition. When done scanning it found items with a "$" in front of them! What does "$" mean? Also when I expanded the unallocated "GHOST" partition (3) it is displayed with a sub partition Ou (6)"excellent"and two other partitions, fr-FR_L2 (4) "poor"and fr-FR_L3 (5)"poor".
The sub partition Ou (6) has the exact same folders/items ( minus the "$" entries) as the Ou(2) partition, but adds the fr-FR_L2 (4) "poor"and fr-FR_L3 (5)"poor" partitions!

Can anyone expound on the anamolies? The "$" entries and f r-FR_L2 (4) "poor"and fr-FR_L3 (5)"poor" partitions circled in blue?
?

 

The drive has a quiet spinning noise! It doesn't sound labored or defective and no clicking sounds either.

The pins on the end are internal at the proprietary connector (i.e. I HAVE to use the cable that came with it) seem OK, but I can't actually see the pins. (See pics)

 

I think I understand why you saw 2 x 466gb partitions in your drive. The Unallocated one is probably the cumulative mess of files that you can't access, while the other one (Ou2 in post #1) is probably just the recovered index table which should allow you to access the files. You probably have to click on Recover after the scan so that you can get your files out of that drive.

Also please read this to understand what the green and red icons mean. I think the $ could be for marking folders and files that were hidden.

Thank you for the connector pics. The adapter is not proprietary. It's microUSB 3.0.

 

well sadly i don't know and not sure about this program, i use r-studio usually.
but since you see original structure of files, are there all there? or missing something?
if you see all there, then you just mark all and recover them on other physical drive.
and then you check recovered files, if they all fine, you go to diskpart
delete all partitions with diskpart and create new partition with format.

 

I'm telling my buddy that he's gotten 8 years out of this SG 500gb. It's time for a new one so go out and buy a new 1tb/2tb USB ext drive, secondly because I don't have 366gb of spare space to recover his files to!