New
#1
SATA Hard Drive Not Reading Disk (Options?)
I have a SATA 1TB Seagate Barracuda that has been acting wonky for a while now. I have been meaning to back up the data on it (which is ~700gb of music and videos) but never got around to it. I think now I may have waited too late.
The drive was bought brand new roughly ~18 months ago and has never been dropped or physically damaged. I take very good care of my hardware. Regular cleanings, maintenance, no damage, etc. Anyway, the drive started acting weird a while ago and was sometimes not coming up as a drive but more often than not the performance was terrible. I had to check cables a few times and tightened them in and everything would be ok for a bit but the performance issues would start up again. I mean terrible performance. Sometimes it would take me 60 secs or more to access the drive after double clicking it. After that initial start up the drive would run fine for a while. It seemed like almost when the drive went to sleep it had an issue waking up or starting up.
Well it finally stopped reading. It won't show up now no matter what I do. I swapped cables, SATA ports, etc. I tested it with my 500gb Seagate Barracuda. That one works fine and when I swap in the 1TB.. nothing. I think the drive may be finished. But as I said, there is no physical damage done to it and also it powers up. I can hear the disks spinning when I connect it. Windows is just not reading it. When I go into my Intel Rapid Storage it comes up as a SATA device (0gb) so something is being read, but I can't see the drive.
What are my options here? I really just want the data off of it because it took me such a long time to collect. Would I be able to take it somewhere and they can get the data off onto a new disk? Is there something I can do myself? I don't see why not. The drive seems in perfect condition. I don't know why it started acting up to begin with, but I just hope it isn't too late to reclaim my data. Anyone?