Hard drive help?

wonder if anyone can help, my mate's Seagate 500gb expansion drive has stopped working - power light still comes on and sounds like it is still running fine - no ticking etc - but computers won't read it. Is there any easy way to fix it or at least recover the data on it? have tried removing the hard drive itself from the housing and fitting it into an external harddrive encosure that i have to see if it would read it but no joy.

any advice would be welcome.

 

You moved it from one USB enclosure to another. Have you tried using a USB port on the back of the computer--sometimes they are better at recognizing devices than the front ones.

 

I use a device similar to this to test hard drives:
http://www.buy.com/prod/inland-usb-...ta/q/sellerid/11408470/loc/111/212885542.html

A few things I'd check, in no particular order:
1. Put it in a computer as the master hard drive, go to BIOS and see if it's recognized.
2. See if the HDD is present in the Disk Management of Windows (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Manager)
3. Try the enclosure with that HDD on a different computer
4. Try a different HDD enclosure with that HDD on any computer

Frankly it sounds like the HDD quietly died, but hopefully one of our suggestions shows some signs of life. I'd also get in touch with the manufacturer in the meantime to find out when your warranty runs out, just in case!

If the hard drive isn't readable and is definitely dead then there are services which retrieve information from dead hard drives, but they're horribly expensive and mainly used by businesses - $700+!