External Hard Drive Read Only, is there a way to change that?

[LilyChilman777]

This hard drive has many important pics on it. I went under Command Prompt as administrator and did driver detail on it. Besides saying that the Current Read Only State and the Read Only saying Yes beside them, the Location Path says unavailable. To make it really weird, sometimes when I first plug it in I can copy stuff from it, but only for like a fraction of a minute, and than it wont let me into files. I have another hard drive of the same brand and size, empty and awaiting to save files from this hard drive. also when I will try to get on the files, some of them will ask me if I want to format the disk, I will say cancel and it will say data error (cyclic redundancy check). I have read else where that this means the disk is failing.

I want to change the drive from read only to a way to get the stuff off the hard drive. Oh the hard drive is a 500GB Free Agent Go Flex Seagate USB 3.0, so is the one I have ready for it.

Also a little bg. when it first died I couldnt even get on far enough to see files. On time I did get on, about 2 weeks later, and was able to see all my files were still there. Than my compy died, since I didnt realize it had come unplugged from the wall. After that once again I couldnt get on it and it was reading as RAW. Than, this past week, all of a sudden it was reading as NFTS, showing the properties (so I can see that the same amount of GB is still the same as before the drive went weird), and letting me get on to the first part, and sometimes into a few of the files (but only ones with sub folders). Thats also when the Read Only started up.

Okay I think I thought of everything. Really I'm just trying away to save my pics, vids, and docs on there. I have wmv, avi, doc, txt, jpeg, wps, and I think thats it (maybe a different image type file).

 

[jumanji]

Create a bootable pendrive with Lucid Puppy on it, boot from it and check whether you can access and retrieve your files from the external HDD.

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/198909-lucid-puppy-way-recover-files-non-bootable-computer.html

 

[LilyChilman777]

I havent tried anything suggested yet, but I have this new bit of info. When I first plug in the hard drive, and its doing its search for content bit, I can copy stuff from the drive during that time. As soon as it stops searching it wont let me copy stuff from the drive any more.

 

[tman69]

before you get 'radical' with the drive--you might want to do some research at the Seagate support site

External Hard Drives | Seagate

see the section on drive diagnostics (I can't give you specifics as you didn't state specifically what model the drive is-and there are many GoFlex models) see this page

Diagnostic tests for Seagate and Maxtor-brand external drives

and this page will show you how to run the Seagate Dashboard diagnostic tool

http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/goflex-desk/