Drive shows in Devices but no has no assigned letter...

I have this little Seagate external drive (250GB) that I'd been using for a while without any problems... until one day it started making all sorts of beepy whirring type noises and my computer didn't seem to like whatever was going on. I kept trying to eject it, and couldn't. So in my frustration, I did something dumb and just unplugged the thing. It hasn't worked since.

When I plug it in, it shows under Devices and Printers (Windows 7) as "FreeAgent Go" so it would seem that it is somewhat recognized... but there's no drive letter assigned, and Disk Management lists the space as "Unallocated". It also pops up an "Initialize Disk" prompt which I would assume would wipe out all the previous data on it.

While the easiest way to make it work again would probably just be to reformat, I really want the data that's still on it... and it's encrypted, so I fear it may be even more complicated to rescue. If I didn't already kill it, that is. Sigh...

Is there any hope?

 

Try This :

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage

From the Computer Management screen, select Storage then Disk Management

This window should show you all of your connected physical drives, their format, if they are healthy, and the drive letter

Right-click on the drive in the list, and from the resulting menu select “Change Drive Letters and Paths

Click on Change so we can change the drive letter. You might notice that you can select Add, which would let you mount the drive into a folder if you wanted to. Yoy don’t want to do that, so just click Change

Select a new drive letter from the drop down list, preferably the one that you usually use for this drive
Click Yes on the confirmation screen and you are done

If you have auto play enabled, you will get the normal pop up dialog asking what you want to do, click this letting it know what you want to do, or click cancel

Hope this does the job for you ! :major

 

Thanks, but if that's all I needed to do I would have solved it by now, since that's what the support section of the manufacturer's website said to do also. There is no such option to do so. Disk Management shows the disk as unallocated. Autoplay doesn't come up, because it's not being fully acknowledged as a drive anymore. It shows as a device, and as a hard disk in Disk Management, but there is no drive letter assigned.

 

Perhaps you could try taking out of the enclosure and hooking it up internally. It may or may not make a difference.

 

Umm... I'm on a laptop. :s

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't "unallocated" usually mean "not formatted"?

 

I've seen numerous posts with people suddenly having Windows see their USB external as RAW but haven't seen a simple answer. I know I have recovered from this situation on an internal drive but it was long ago and I can't remember how I did it except it was a 2 minute fix using Test Disk.

Just to get a little information. Run Partition Wizard and see if it displays the drive as unallocated as well. If, however, it shows a partition then highlight the partition and try to Explore it using that option from the left panel. The files are encrypted so they may not show properly. Just see if it shows file.

If it doesn't show a partition then make sure you have the USB disk# highlighted and use the Partition Recovery option. Let it check the whole disk using Quick Scan and see if it finds anything. Don't necessarily let it recover but just check if it finds any partitions.

 

Yup, format it, quick is good enough and then partition the drive if you wish.

 

I also recommend EASEUS Partition Master as well. I have had that exact same thing happen with External HD's and it does wonders on recovering the data. I would first offload it elsewhere and then if you want to try and repair the boot sector of the external HD then go ahead.