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SEVERE problems with external hard drive

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Exo

PCHF Member
Dec 27, 2021
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Hello I, hope you're having a good day.

For the past 2 or so hours I've had problems with my external hard drive, a 1tb portable seagate expansion drive.

I worked just fine just earlier in the day, but then I opened a game (on steam, installed on my computer's interal drive, not the seagate drive). I was playing with some friends at their house, and even though we were all using the same internet, I was having lag spikes once every few minutes that would completely freeze me for up to 2-3 minutes sometimes. This might be unrelated, I wouldn't know. I tried restarting two times, but it didn't help and I simply endured the spikes, it seemed to get a bit better towards the end, freezing less often and for shorter amounts of time.

After I was done playing, I saw all the games on steam which I had installed on my expansion drive were greyed out, uninstalled. I checked in file explorer, and my expansion drive wasn't showing either. I don't remember whether this happened after or during playing, after one of the times I restarted.

After seeing that my expansion drive wasn't showing up, I tried following a guide that mimicked what I was experiencing, going into disk management and creating a new volume, etc, formatting it and so on. It..Sort of works? It creates a new drive, yes, but It only has 460gb or so of the 1tb space it had before. Of course, every file and every game I stored on the drive is gone too. Is it locked away, somehow? This didn't work, and I tried deleting the volume a few times, remaking it, basically messing around hoping to brute force a fix. It didn't work.

Restarting my PC, it got stuck on an ASUS splash screen, Which I found out only happens when the expansion drive is plugged into my PC. After figuring that out and being happy that I can launch my pc again, I tried another ''possible fix'' listen in the guide, which was going into the BIOS and changing the boot order, as the USB might be preceding the actual computer in booting, causing it to get stuck. This didn't work, it still doesn't launch when I try to launch my pc with the drive plugged in, though admittedly I might not have done it correctly.

The PC is prebuilt, and the only thing I've changed is the Ram installed, which I did almost half a year ago, encountering 0 problems.
PC specs:


Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz
Installed RAM 16.0 GB
Graphics card 1060 6gb
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

TL;DR
External hard drive doesn't work which messes with my entire computer.
 
In short, pc is fine without the external drive, and won’t boot to Windows if the drive is connected?

good chance the external drive has failed, something that is reasonably common with such drives simply due to their external, mobile, nature.

go into a command prompt and run the CHKDSK command on that drive, checking for errors and bad sectors.
you can also try plugging the external drive into another pc to verify its integrity.
 
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In short, pc is fine without the external drive, and won’t boot to Windows if the drive is connected?

good chance the external drive has failed, something that is reasonably common with such drives simply due to their external, mobile, nature.

go into a command prompt and run the CHKDSK command on that drive, checking for errors and bad sectors.
you can also try plugging the external drive into another pc to verify its integrity.
You can try using Hard disk Sentinal pro app & check your harddisk health.. also for bad sectors..probably your hdd is having problems
I'll try these. Since yesterday the hard drive has been quietly beeping when it's plugged in, manufacturer says this most likely is due to insufficient power, which I will need a new cable to fix. Thanks for all the help.
 
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Is the external unit a 2.5” or 3.5” drive?
or in other words a small laptop drive or the larger desktop drive?
the smaller would not need extra power while the later definitely would.

but the drive had been working fine hadn’t it?
how old?
under warranty still?
hasn't had a knock or such that you know of while it was connected? Or even dropped while disconnected?
 
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