I have a 500 GB Seagate portable external hard drive model 9ZA2AH-500. It was working fine untill yesterday. Now when I plug it in all I get is a faint beeping sound Then it stops. I have tried plugging it in on different computers but none of them recognize it. I have thousands of files and pictures on it. What can I do to fix this without losing everything?

Brian Sullivan

• 27725 Answers
• Posted on Jun 06, 2011

SOURCE: my 500 gb PN:9ZA2AH-501

"water" is taboo any where near a compter dry everything out before proceeding
if your computer came with a motherboard disc the drivers could be on it
click start control panel administrive tools ,computer management ,device manager look through all of your devices if you see a yellow question mark?or exclamation mark ! or red x
right click to reinstall drivers or
if you can see your usb but its not working
ports(com&lpt)right click update driver
just replace the cable of the hard disk, when you plugged the external disk drive you got that windows could recognize the USB device change the cable everything should work fine again, sometimes the wires inside the cable will be damaged due to bending or stretching or placing heavy equipment upon the cable,
check the USB leads that attach to the motherboard usually red-white-green-black make sure they are securely seated and have no dust build up on them dust will cause static and a lot of unforeseen problems
click start control panel administrive tools computer management disk management right click on your drive select properties click tools you should see click check now click start two boxes automatically fix files and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors place then a tick in both boxes then select check now start or you might tick one box then return after its finished the first repair then return and tick the second box you should not do anything while the chkdsk utility is in progress any input may damage this drive
hope this helps

SOURCE: I have a portable Seagate Free Agent Go Model

You can try taking it out of the usb enclosure and connecting it directly to a sata port.

But most likely you will need to send it out for data recovery. The most reasonably priced service I know of is

http://300dollardatarecovery.com

SOURCE: I have a portable Seagate Free Agent Go Model

I don't think that they are a very good company. view this youtube video of them in action. It's really them too. funny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxgq8fSmACE

BEWARE!