Summary: This article will take you through a couple of simple steps to resolve the issue about “Seagate external hard drive not responding” on Windows 10, 8, 7.
Unlike internal hard drives, external hard drives have made life much easier and more convenient due to its portability that lets you carry your data anytime, anywhere. However, sometimes accessing data from external drives can become challenging due to any damage/error in the drive, making them not responding.
Through this article, we will introduce you to some of the best solutions to repair and fix the external hard drive including the simple steps to recover all your vital data stored in it with the help of a software recovery software.
Table of Contents
What Causes the Issue “Seagate External Hard Drive Not Responding”?
Below are some of the factors causing this issue.
- Drive letter conflict can be one of the mysterious reasons to make an external hard drive not responding. This implies that the external hard drive’s drive letter had already been occupied by some of the computer’s local drive.
- Corrupted system drivers.
- Incorrect CMOS settings.
- Failure of the USB data line.
- Power outages.
- Bad Sectors.
What Can We Do Now?
To eliminate Seagate external hard drive not responding error, there are several checking to troubleshoot,
- Try with other USB port
- Change the USB data line to another new one.
- Connect to another PC that has a different system.
- Change another power outage.
If this troubleshooting luckily gets your hard drive back, you’ll have to start a new checking the Disk Management to find whether you can see the Seagate external hard drive there.
Check Whether the Drive Shows in the Disk Management
Step1: Press Win Logo Key + R and then type:diskmgmt.msc, after opening the Disk Management, if you are lucky enough, you will be able to see the drive showing in the right-panel.
Step 2: Check if the drive status is showing as unallocated, RAW or disk unknown, not initialized?
The first thing is staying calm that the disk has been turned to unallocated, RAW or not initialized, and if they’re having essential data on the Seagate external hard drive, there’s still no need to be worried as we’ve already worked out the solutions for helping you to overcome the error.
However, what to do next if we need to retrieve the data from the drive? As any other solutions that may cause the data to lose permanently, then we strongly recommend you to try with the data recovery on your drive first, and here goes the tutorial in detail for you to follow.
Steps to Recover Data Using Bitwar Data Recovery Software:
Step1: Download the recovery tool from “https://www.r-datarecovery.com”, and then install it in your computer system.
Download for PCDownload for Mac
Step2: Launch the Bitwar Data Recovery Software and select the Seagate external hard drive from the device list.
Step3: You will be able to see the disk type is showing as NTFS_RAW, then, select the partition and then click Next.
Step4: As Bitwar Data Recovery has the ability to detect the original file system, then here we can choose Quick Scan, which supports to retrieve the lost data with the original file name, folder structure.
Step5: Now, select the file types as per your need and then hit on the Scan button, double-click on the file to preview the data, and then click on the Recover button to start data recovery.
After recovering the data, let’s take a look at other advanced solutions that can get rid of the not responding or working issue.
Solutions to Fix and Repair “Seagate External Hard Drive Not Responding”
Solution 1: Using CHKDSK
Step1: Press Win Logo key + S and then type CMD, right-click on the CMD and choose Run as an administrator.
Step2: Now, type “chkdsk X: /r /f”. Here X stands for an external drive letter and /r /f are chkdsk parameters.
Step3: Now, the chkdsk will initiate scanning, verification and repairing procedure. After this, when the process is completed, reconnect your external hard drive to check if it can be accessed or not.
Solution 2: Reinstalling Drivers
Step1: Press Win logo key + R and then type:devmgmt.msc
Step2: In Device Manager window look for Disk Drivers from the available devices list and expand it.
Step3: Now, choose your external hard drive by right-clicking on it and select the option to “Uninstall”. After this, click on the OK button to confirm the uninstallation.
Step4: Eject your external hard drive then connect it back again and wait for the driver’s installation to get finished.
Step5: At last, launch File Explorer and check whether the external hard drive can be accessed or not.
Solution 3: Updating the Drive
If uninstalling the drive of the Seagate doesn’t make any sense, then the error of Seagate external hard drive not responding may be caused by the out-to-dated driver, then update the driver of the drive worth you a try.
Step1: Still, go back to the Device Manager and then finding your drive, right-click on it and select “Properties”.
Step2: Here under the General tab, you may come across an error code 10/28/43.
Step3: Now, go back to the Device Manager, right-click on your external drive with error and select an option to Uninstall followed by “Search automatically for updated driver software”.
Step4: In the final step, shut down your computer system and eject the Seagate external hard drive from it. Now, reboot your computer system after a while, plug the external drive into any other port and let Windows install the device drivers.
Other Solutions Worth a Try
- Running the anti-virus software to perform a full disk scanning.
- Downloading the Bad sector scan software, if the problem caused by the bad sector, you can also use Bitwar Data Recovery Software to skip these bad sectors and perform the data recovery from the sections that still are in good condition.
Conclusion
Many reasons may cause a “Seagate external hard drive not responding” issue, which can hamper your work and cause panic due to the inaccessibility of vital files and data. Thus it is essential to understand these causes and prevent them from occurring again. In this article, we have shared some simple methods to overcome this issue effectively. However, before using these solutions, it is necessary to recover your precious data from the drive with error to avoid any loss of data. This can be done with the help of efficient and robust recovery software like Bitwar Data Recovery that is trusted all across the world to recover any data from any storage device.
The software is entirely user-friendly with straightforward and quick steps, which promises to provide safe and sound data recovery.