External hard drive has stopped working

Hi Guys

My Seagate 500GB external hard drive has stopped working for me today! Its been connected to my PC and was fine last night. The drive is no longer being recognised by windows. When its connected I can see it in device manager as a usb mass storage device but its not showing up in disk management. I can hear the disk spinning normally in the case so at least it still sounds healthy but I cant get windows to recognise it.

A few HD's that have gone bust on me before so I tried the usual tactics. I switched out the cables and tried connecting it to another PC but it was the same issue. Ive removed the disk from the case and connected it directly to my PC. When I boot up now I can see an extra disk is showing in my computer but I still cant access it (just showing as Local Disk (F). When I check device manager under disk drives its just listed as "disk drive" and now I cant even access disk management as it just freezes when I open it. Ive also tried to format it but I got an error message at the start saying it was unable to format.

Any thoughts?

 

Make a Parted Magic boot disk (it's Linux based ) and see if you can access the drive with that. http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads

Is the data on the drive backed up? If you can't read the drive with Parted Magic it's probably gone bad. Under warranty?

Sam