Windows 10: My external hard drive suddenly became inaccessible, and I have important data stored on...

Yesterday, when I connected external hard drive to my computer I was shocked to find that it was inaccessible. I rely on this external drive to store work-related files. However, when I tried to access it, I received an error message stating that the drive is not accessible.

:)

 

External hard drive is inaccessible


I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive that I use to store (majority) videos and documents. A few days ago it started giving me this error for every folder and file, and eventually just from trying to access the hard drive itself from This PC:




And this is what shows up in Device Manager:






In Disk Management, this is what shows up at first (first image) and then when I refresh Disk Management through Action > Refresh (second image):






As for specifications wise, I clean installed to Windows 10 Pro N x64 (a day after this error came up when I plugged in the hard drive, actually... Not sure what I was thinking at the time) with what I think are updated drivers for my hardware from the manufacturer's websites. Previously, it was a clean installation of Windows 10 Pro x64 after upgrading from Windows 8.1 Pro x64.

Not sure if this is worth mentioning, but, all my folders and files show up when the computer actually can read the hard drive, I just can't open any of them. I've never had to deal with hardware problems before, so, if I'm missing something incredibly simple, please point me in the right direction. I really don't want to lose the files in that hard drive, as I'm not able to make a backup even if it was working (with it being my biggest external to date).

P.S. > Not sure if it helps, but, this is what the hard drive shows on Speccy at a glance:




(Is the serial number and firmware version supposed to be the same on all hard drives? )

 

External Hard Drive

Hi John,

We suggest that you try the troubleshooting steps below:

• Open your External Hard Drive file in File Explorer.
• Type the name of the file you want to search on the search box and click Enter.

The file will show up in Search Results and you will be able to move it to the correct folder.

Let us know if you need further help.

 

External hard drive is inaccessible


Say, is this supposed to happen? I plugged in the hard drive again to see if Crystal Disk Info can find it this time, but, this shows up in Disk Management:




And yeah, I see what you mean. It showed up finally, after about 10 minutes of being a background process.

EDIT > Try #2, program can't seem to find the external hard drive. Not sure what to do at this point.




The only hard drive it's picking up is my internal hard drive.