My Seagate 4TB SSD expansion portable drive just stopped being recognized, disk management tells me it is not initialized but when I try to initialize it I get an I/O device error, drive is no longer showing a volume letter so chkdsk won't work, I have tried several recovery programs but none are recognizing the drive, device manager is recognizing it and I still have to eject it on windows 7 PC, windows 10 notebook is not recognizing it at all which it used to do, any helpful suggestions as to how to proceed Please, Many thanks.
Expansion portable drive not recognized
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g'day newbie and welcome to the forums. 
have you connected the external drive to another PC?
what about removing the SSD from the enclosure and connecting directly to the motherboard of another PC?
this will determine if it's the drive or the enclosure at fault.
have you connected the external drive to another PC?
what about removing the SSD from the enclosure and connecting directly to the motherboard of another PC?
this will determine if it's the drive or the enclosure at fault.
Hey Bruceg'day newbie and welcome to the forums.
have you connected the external drive to another PC?
what about removing the SSD from the enclosure and connecting directly to the motherboard of another PC?
this will determine if it's the drive or the enclosure at fault.
Yes I have connected to two others, one notebook and one laptop both windows ten, they didn't recognize the drive at all, my PC runs windows 7 and the drive shows up in disk management as unknown and not initialized, also in device manager as Seagate expansion USB device, also as eject expansion as open device in safely remove hardware and eject media. I will remove SSD and try a direct connection, thank you, will let you know the result.
sounds like a plan. 
although my money is on the drive itself going bad, if you are lucky, it may just be the caddy.
but we are hardly ever that lucky!
although my money is on the drive itself going bad, if you are lucky, it may just be the caddy.
but we are hardly ever that lucky!
Hey Bruce,sounds like a plan.
although my money is on the drive itself going bad, if you are lucky, it may just be the caddy.
but we are hardly ever that lucky!
Thanks for your help thus far, as you suggested I have now connected my SSD drive directly to the mother board and it is not being recognized at all, do you have any thoughts on how I might recover the data, I have tried EaseUS, Recuva and Disk Drill.
I have recently discovered Disk Drill myself, after being a Recuva man beforehand.
If those 3 programs can't help you, that really only leaves the professionals, and if you didn't already know, those guys charge very handsomely for their services.
Back in the day when I referred clients to those guys, over my time I referred about 20 - cheapest was $450 and the dearest was $3500. It all depends on how down and dirty they have to go in getting your data back.
So the reward has to be worth the effort and expense.
This is why we backup (see my signature!) - but it sounds like the horse has already bolted so no good shutting that gate now!
What sort of files are we talking about? - old family photos, tax records, important documents?
If those 3 programs can't help you, that really only leaves the professionals, and if you didn't already know, those guys charge very handsomely for their services.
Back in the day when I referred clients to those guys, over my time I referred about 20 - cheapest was $450 and the dearest was $3500. It all depends on how down and dirty they have to go in getting your data back.
So the reward has to be worth the effort and expense.
This is why we backup (see my signature!) - but it sounds like the horse has already bolted so no good shutting that gate now!
What sort of files are we talking about? - old family photos, tax records, important documents?
Hey Bruce,
Again thanks for all your help, my Desktop PC automatically backs up, but it's old, windows 7 and backs up from a 300 GB system drive to a 300 GB back up drive all onboard, it's not large enough for all my data and not portable, so I kept everything on a HDD external drive which failed, but I was able to recover all my data, so I got the SSD external with the understanding that they are more reliable, but once bitten twice shy I got two and back one up to the other, my problem lies in frequency, because of the down time involved it takes about a week, I have only been backing up every three months and it was due when the drive failed, I'm thinking in the future I will back up to two externals all the time at the same time instead of in one big chunk four times a year, I have done a lot data entry in the last few months some I can redo a lot I will lose forever, anyhow back to the problem at hand, I'm kinda at a loss to understand the failure, I think windows might have been updating in the background and the drive was plugged in and when I looked in windows explorer it was not showing so I unplugged it and plugged it back in, it shows up where it's supposed to except explorer, surely there must be something to fix an I/O device error to initialize a drive or to give a drive a letter so that chkdsk works, hopefully I'm not clutching at straws.
Again thanks for all your help, my Desktop PC automatically backs up, but it's old, windows 7 and backs up from a 300 GB system drive to a 300 GB back up drive all onboard, it's not large enough for all my data and not portable, so I kept everything on a HDD external drive which failed, but I was able to recover all my data, so I got the SSD external with the understanding that they are more reliable, but once bitten twice shy I got two and back one up to the other, my problem lies in frequency, because of the down time involved it takes about a week, I have only been backing up every three months and it was due when the drive failed, I'm thinking in the future I will back up to two externals all the time at the same time instead of in one big chunk four times a year, I have done a lot data entry in the last few months some I can redo a lot I will lose forever, anyhow back to the problem at hand, I'm kinda at a loss to understand the failure, I think windows might have been updating in the background and the drive was plugged in and when I looked in windows explorer it was not showing so I unplugged it and plugged it back in, it shows up where it's supposed to except explorer, surely there must be something to fix an I/O device error to initialize a drive or to give a drive a letter so that chkdsk works, hopefully I'm not clutching at straws.
as Peter has said - see if you can see the drive from BIOS.
in case you didn't know, pressing F10, or Del, or F2 as the PC starts are the usual ways to get into BIOS.
sadly, SSD's fail as well.
as to backing up, yes, it sounds like you were all over it but as you stat, just not frequent enough.
plus it sounds like you may have been doing a full backup each time instead of an incremental one - that is, only backing up the files that have changed since the last backup.
in my signature, I have been using ViceVersa for something like 20 years, simply love it and have had to use it a few time to restore files - trust it implicitly.
Macrium is great for taking an image of the whole drive but I've moved away from those a bit in favour of reloading Windows from scratch. I still take a snapshot using Macrium once or twice a year, just for the warm fuzzy feeling really, plus old habits die hard!
I've given Cobian a run a few times and it seems to work very well, just haven't used it yet for restoring files.
in case you didn't know, pressing F10, or Del, or F2 as the PC starts are the usual ways to get into BIOS.
sadly, SSD's fail as well.
as to backing up, yes, it sounds like you were all over it but as you stat, just not frequent enough.
plus it sounds like you may have been doing a full backup each time instead of an incremental one - that is, only backing up the files that have changed since the last backup.
in my signature, I have been using ViceVersa for something like 20 years, simply love it and have had to use it a few time to restore files - trust it implicitly.
Macrium is great for taking an image of the whole drive but I've moved away from those a bit in favour of reloading Windows from scratch. I still take a snapshot using Macrium once or twice a year, just for the warm fuzzy feeling really, plus old habits die hard!
I've given Cobian a run a few times and it seems to work very well, just haven't used it yet for restoring files.
Do you have any data you need to get off this computer? If yes then make a ubuntu bootable usb or dvd
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#1-overview NO install needed
Or here is a Youtube on how to make the usb
Copy your data to an external drive or another computer/nas.
Insert the usb or cd/dvd and boot your system. You may have to change bios settings to boot from the usb or cd/dvd(every computer is different) We can help with this.
If you are copying to another usb drive plug it in before booting.
When the computer boots choose TRY UBUNTU and let the system boot.
When booted look on the left-hand side of the screen and click on Files icon
Then click on Other Locations
Click on your drive for example Win 7
Click on Users Icon
Click on your name listed under users
You should now see your data e.g Documents Pictures etc.
Copy your data to an external drive or another computer/nas.
When finished Click on the shutdown icon in the top right-hand corner Click on Power Off
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#1-overview NO install needed
Or here is a Youtube on how to make the usb
Copy your data to an external drive or another computer/nas.
Insert the usb or cd/dvd and boot your system. You may have to change bios settings to boot from the usb or cd/dvd(every computer is different) We can help with this.
If you are copying to another usb drive plug it in before booting.
When the computer boots choose TRY UBUNTU and let the system boot.
When booted look on the left-hand side of the screen and click on Files icon
Then click on Other Locations
Click on your drive for example Win 7
Click on Users Icon
Click on your name listed under users
You should now see your data e.g Documents Pictures etc.
Copy your data to an external drive or another computer/nas.
When finished Click on the shutdown icon in the top right-hand corner Click on Power Off
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