Seagate expansion drive not recognised

I have a Seagate expansion portable drive 500Gb. It has been running ok until the last month where now on plugging into the USB slot, autorun runs for 3 -5 seconds and nothing more happens. When I go into My Computer whereas before it showed the drive as F: Seagate, it now shows as F: local disc.

If I click on this drive, after a delay I get the "F:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". And yet I have downloaded and scanned with Seagate Tools for Windows which shows the drive and gives it an ok status.

I have looked in Disc Management where it shows my C: as "healthy system" and the F: (Seagate) as "healthy active" and % free with a value of 100% and fault tolerance value of NO and OVERHEAD = 0%.

My Device Manager also shows it as being recognised.

I've tried the Seagate community forum to no avail.

Any ideas please - much appreciated.

 

First guess would be a corrupted File System. When you open disk management the drive should be seen something like this:

Seagate F:
465.76 GB NTFS
Healthy (Primary)

Do you see NTFS or something like RAW or Unallocated etc.?

 

Thanks for the reply NameHere.

What I see in disk management is:

Volume: F
Layout: Partition
Type: Basic
File System: (this is blank - my C drive shows as NTFS)
Status: Health (active)
Capacity: 465.76Gb
Free space: 465.76Gb
% free: 100%
Fault tolerance: No
Overhead: 0%

A colleague has tried the Seagate drive on his PC and cannot access it and gets the same error message, but he has got File Recovery for Windows and copied and saved my files.

Hope this throws some light on my issue.

 

It still sounds like a corrupt file system.

Okay, if you look to the bottom right hand side of disk management you should see something that looks like the following.

Use the following to see what a drive should look like:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865/

Click on the Windows 7 and scroll to the very bottom and with minor exceptions your drive should look like that. The drive must have a file system to be accessible. I know that link is to WD but it gives a better picture of what your drive should look like. If you have the data you can use the same link to format the drive, just select your OS.

 

Many thanks NameHere. Will give it a go after I've managed to grab any files off the drive with Seagate File Recovery.