Serious External Hard Drive Issues

[Tonytone604]

Hello internet. This is my first ever post to a forum so know that I am truely lost. Went to future shop n grabbed a 1tb seagate external harddirve. Being the newb I am I followed the sales associates instructions by "plug it in and drag and drop files" . I backed everything important to me in this drive and checked it to see if I could retrieve them. yes I could. Now after a c drive recovery to factory setting the explorer window wont show it. THIS IS NOT TYPICAL TO OTHER PROBLEMS I"VE SEEN. My device manager shows everything is working fine but in my disc management window it shows two blank drives on the top (one is built in internal I assume) there is also 2 regular drives under that (c and d). the drives say healthy eisa config. but my :d says primary partition???. The stupid vista bleep happens when i plug it in but I can't get into it. The same assoiciate says I should have formatted it before use (yea yea I know) but that they will now charge me for a data retrieval. I dont care about anything but my data years of photos and video I cannot lose. Ive recently lost family members due to a tragic accident and need these files for a memorial project im trying to do. PLEASE HELP ME PEOPLE and thank you sooo much for taking the time to read.

[Una]

Trouble shooting the hard drive may allow the drive to function properly. As you have seagate external hard drive you can look out for the trouble shooting process on its official website. You need to type Seagate External Hard Drive Issues on Google and may be get the link to resolve

[Venator]

I think there is some data will corrupt on your hard disk, You need to recover that data by some one special who have good information about hard drive back up. Can you send me your location, then i will help you to go for the address of any hardware specialist in your area. If your external drive have warranty then you should need to go for that company support center. You can also visit these thread for more information :

Problem with my external hard drive pls help
Big Problem with Toshiba External hard drive
http://forums.techarena.in/vista-har...es/1176830.htm

[Tonytone604]

Ok , I've visited about a hundred sites and every one shows a pic of the disk management screen. my external has no letter beside it and it says healthy EISA config. when i rightclick the only thing that comes up is help. I cannot adjust setting on the drive. it looks identical to my built in 6.83 gb thats shown with my c: and d: drives except its 983gb the seagate site helps not because they all rely on the pretense that the right click should get me to formatting and partitioning. Obviously im trying to keep my data, ive tried many of the reliable freeware programs but my drive is not in that list of avail. drives only the 6.83 and my c and d. This problem does not seem typical based on my previous searches. thank you very much

[Tonytone604]

Ive used EASEUS recovery software and it worked great. the only remaining issue is connecting back to the drive. like before it beeps when i plug it in but perhaps its setup like a built in drive?? thank you again guys

[Tonytone604]

Ok everyone thanks for your help I got her. It seems when I started dumping files onto the external before it was formatted it didnt create any volumes or partitions I was exploring diskpart and i did a clean on the specified drive . starting from scratch i was able to create a basic volume (many of the other options weren't available on this version of windows)(vista) after that I could then assign a letter and format. at this point It finally showed up on the explorer screen and functioned normally. I thank you all again and will continue to explore this forum