I'm dont' have the most advanced technical lingo, but if anyone has any insight, many thanks in advance:

I bought this Seagate HD about a year and a half ago. Several months ago, my room mate knocked the HD off a very low ledge, but broke off the connecting USB piece. Our tech guy at work told me I needed an enclosure to stick the HD into, so I bought one and it worked perfectly fine until yesterday. I was listening to some music on the HD and suddenly the computer became very slow and froze. I shut it down and when I turned it back on, the HD would not be recognized by the computer in "My Computer" and would not auto-run.

When I rebooted, the computer would not recognize the HD (not dead - it's spooling and seems to be active). When I separate the HD from the enclosure, the computer will recognize the enclosure. Could this just be a connectivity problem between the encl & the HD? Should I just buy a new enclosure?

I also have a shortcut from my desktop to the HD. When I double click on it, I get an hourglass, but nothing happens. It's as if my computer is confused. When I eventually detach the HD, I THEN pop-up that says the link cannot be found.

Any recommendations?

If connected to the PC directly works ok, then it's the enclosure failing.

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If you go to Computer Management - Disk Management, can you see the HDD there?

Try and connect it directly to the SATA port on your machine without the USB case, then you can eliminate the case.

If your PC doesn't detect the HDD when connected via SATA, then you have a problem.

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since it was knocked over/dropped, there is a good chance one of the reading heads inside was damaged, and continuing to use it after that just made things worse.

You can try another enclosure (99% sure that is not the issue tho), but I have a feeling that you are now in the professional needed phase to get the data off.

Good Luck

I connected it directly to the computer and it didn't recognize it. Looks like I have a bigger problem on my hands. Thanks for the suggestions.

You could get a terminal report from the drive. That would provide more information regarding the actual fault.

See the following thread:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda- ... 036#M19464

I suggest that you don't issue any commands to the drive.

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