Solving the issue of Seagate External Hard Drive Not Working Without Losing Data

Seagate external hard drive not working, does it show up?

Seagate is a well-known brand of hard disk storage with users all over the world. Many people use Seagate portable hard drives with 500GB, 1TB or 2TB capacity to back up their data. However, after long-term usage, especially with frequent inappropriate usage such as incompatibility between its preloaded system and software with a new OS, mixing usage among multiple computers, improper ejection, physical shocks, etc., the Seagate portable hard drive may stop working.

When a hard drive (including an external one) fails, it means you can't save new data to it, and you might not be able to access any existing data. To fix a Seagate external hard drive without losing your data, you need to know how to troubleshoot the problem and repair different levels of damage, as well as when you might lose your data.

Please provide the English content you want to translate, and I'll promptly translate it into Chinese for you.

[[1]](#1) Basic Troubleshooting

Let's troubleshoot step by step, starting with basic checks and moving to advanced troubleshooting. First, when your Seagate hard drive is not detected or showing up in Windows Explorer, try the following fundamental troubleshooting steps.

• Try a different USB port on your computer.
• If possible, try using a different USB cable.
• Is there another computer nearby? Try connecting the hard drive to that computer.
• Check if the Seagate external hard drive light is blinking. If it's not lit at all, then the power adapter isn't getting power.
• If there's no light, try plugging the power adapter into a different outlet, or plug it directly into the wall.

After some basic troubleshooting, if the hard drive keeps showing up, you don't have to worry too much about data loss. But remember to back up your hard drive data in case it's not too late, the Todo Backup Free tool allows scheduled automatic backup schemes.

If that didn't work, you might need to do some further troubleshooting to get your Seagate external hard drive to show up and work in Windows. This time, head into the Windows Disk Management tool and check the drive's status there.

Step 1: Press Windows + R, type compmgmt.msc in Run, and press Enter.

In "Computer Management," click on "Disk Management" on the left pane to check the disk information that represents your Seagate portable hard drive.

If you're lucky enough to see it there, even as some weird characters, including [1] "unallocated", [2] "RAW", or [3] "disk unknown, not initialized", don't panic. In this case, the Seagate portable hard drive is inaccessible and won't open, but you can try to recover data with the Data Recovery Wizard tool. The linked pages also provide 100% applicable solutions for Seagate external hard drives.

[[2] Troubleshooting](#2)

If you don't see any sign of the Seagate external hard drive in Disk Management, you'll need to go into Device Manager to check for storage devices.

Step 1: Open Computer Management again, and this time click on Device Manager in the left pane.

Step 2: Under "Disk Drives," locate the name of your Seagate external hard drive and check its status.

If the hard drive is not listed under Disk Drives, look for an entry called Unknown Device, Other Devices, or a Mass Storage Device with a yellow exclamation mark icon.

Step 4: Right-click on the drive and select "Properties".

Step 5: You may see Error Code 10, Error Code 28, or Error Code 43 under the General tab.

6. Return to Device Manager, right-click the problematic driver, and select “Uninstall” > “Search automatically for updated driver software.”

Step 7: Turn off your computer and disconnect the Seagate external drive. Wait for a moment, then restart your computer and reconnect the drive to a different port. You should now see Windows installing the device driver.

How can I recover data from a Seagate external hard drive that's not working properly?

After getting the Seagate external hard drive not responding or unresponsive issue fixed, you should check whether you can access the data on the drive. Whenever you want to recover data from a non-working Seagate external hard drive, it's worth a try of the Data Recovery Wizard tool. It's a reliable, powerful yet easy-to-use data recovery tool with a high reputation worldwide.

It comes in handy when you cannot access a Seagate external hard drive that shows as unallocated, RAW, or unknown. Since Windows Disk Management can recognize the drive, so can the Data Recovery Wizard tool.

Just download and run the software on your Windows/Mac computer, scan the hard drive to find inaccessible data. Besides, if you have already tried to format the RAW external hard drive to NTFS/FAT32, it is still able to recover data from formatted partition. Now, it's your turn to run the software for Seagate hard drive data recovery.

Step 1: Connect your external hard drive to the computer using the correct USB cable. Launch Disk Drill, and you will see your external HDD listed under “External Drives.” The software supports all popular external hard drive brands, including WD, Seagate, Toshiba, LaCie, SanDisk, Samsung, and more.

Select the external hard drive and click on the “Scan” button.

Step 2: As the scan progresses, the software will find more and more lost and deleted data, which will be displayed in the scan results. The recovered data is well organized. You can quickly locate your target file/folder by file type, or search for it by its exact name in the search box.

Step 3. You can preview the files found by the scanning algorithm of the Data Recovery Wizard. Then, select the files and click “Recover”. To avoid data overwriting, we recommend saving the recovered data to a different drive than the original Seagate one.

You can also watch this video tutorial to learn how to recover data from an external hard drive.