Portable HD gone wacko, please help!

I have a Seagate 1.5TB Freeagent Goflex portable drive and today when I plugged in the USB for my weekly backup, the Windows Backup and Restore says my drive was disconnected.

When I opened up my Windows Explorer, the portable drive is showing up as "Local Disk" (instead of Freeagent Goflex) and completely empty. When I click on properties, it states the drive is only 5.26 GB with 3.53GB used.

I then tried right click Computer/Manage/Disk Management, there the drive is showing up as 1.5TB FAT in all its glory "Health (Active, Primary Partition).

I tried "chkdsk" and it found no problem with the file system but managed to located on ~67MB of space on this disk.

When I tried on a different PC and it showed the same thing. I tried to search for a solution on Google and this forum and didn't even know where to begin. Obviously I'd like to recover the files on the portable drive and non-destructive (just-format-it) suggestions are more desirable.

I am on a Windows 7, 64-bit, Home Premium, with no virus if these info matter.

Thanks.

 

You should download a copy of Parted Magic and burn it to a disk. It's a Linux based data recovery tool. It'll will allow you to boot up outside of Windows. You can then explore your Seagate and see if the files are visible there. At the very least, you can use it to move the files off of it.

Perhaps the partition table got screwed up or something? I don't really know much about how that works.

 

I plugged it into a Mac and got the same 5.26GB capacity nonsense. Running a software called TestDisk right now, it will take the rest of the day... Will try the Linux route if this doesn't work.

Depressing. Do we need backup for our backups?

 

Maybe a call or email to Seagate tech support would help. Since it is not your primary OS drive you have some time to get it right. Be carefull what you do and wehn you finally decide make notes. I find that making quick decisions and trying something usually makes things worse.

 

This is where I think the Linux option will be most beneficial. It's not limited to the rules of the other OS's. For example... I cannot plug in a Mac formated iPod to my computer and take the songs from it. But... I CAN plug it in while running Parted Magic and easily navigate to all of the files. I can then drag them to one of my hard drives, boot into Windows, et voila!

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. But nothing worked. Contacted Seagate and they had me run some diagnostic stuff from their website to prove there is nothing wrong (physically) with the drive and apparently that's where the warranty stops. Suggested I could pay to have the data recovered by them... Whatever...