Drive was fine before, today its simply not responding at all or coming up even as a drive letter in disk mgmt utility (W10). When I plug it in with usb3 cable, the connected device sound effect in windows chimes up, but nothing ever appears in file explorer, not when I launch the disk management utility. When I disconnect the usb cable, again windows chimes out. The fact that connecting/disconnecting does something is encouraging, but Im not able to see any partitions or drive letters, or anything. Ive also tried looking at list disk in cmd window, no go. The disk itself is making a slight humming sound with intermittent oscillating sounds, higher pitched. I cannot hear the usual scratching sounds that are associated with an hdd.

Seagate will not do anything for me, despite it being only a little over a year old. Im ready to open it up. Anyone have anything else for me to try? thanks folks

Do NOT open it up, you'll only make it 100x worse.

It's probably media and/or firmware issues, which should be reasonably straightforward for a data recovery specialist and so relatively inexpensive.

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It could also be stiction (heads stuck to the platters). Still not a DIY fix.

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Sabo Computer Repairs & Data Recovery

Read about stiction but dont see the diff bw freeing the head myself and paying more than the price of a new drive in fees to have someone else do it? Someone advise the practical difference...? Realistic cost to recover that data? Just a bunch of movies...

The cost of a new drive has nothing to do with the value of the data on the current drive. Doing it yourself risks losing any chance of recovering the data, by anyone, and the odds are very good that's what will happen with DIY. If the data is simply not worth the cost of recovery (which is quite understandable) and you are comfortable with the potential loss, go ahead and try it yourself. You may get lucky. I hope so.

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Sabo Computer Repairs & Data Recovery

You mean there is seperate firmware for the drive itself? Or are you referring my computer fw?

If I remember a years ago analogy, picture an F-16, flying close to Mach One speed, 100 feet above a road lane about 6-10 feet wide, veering neither left or right. The heads have to be very precise in alignment...like other posters indicated, not a DIY.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

There are known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. In this situation you are in the unknown unknowns territory. But as someone said you may be lucky. Be warned though, you would need to be about as lucky as Wile E. Coyote finally catching the Roadrunner — but, like him, you probably wouldn't know what to do then.