My seagate st3250410as if installed directly or as a usb external drive will not permit windows or dos to install. My bios sees it and identifies it correctly. Mhdd displays an error and will not communicate with it. Spotmau will see one of the partitions but not the other. When I plug it in as an external drive on pc running win 7 or xp, the light indicating its busy lights up. If I turn off the pc, windows will hang until I unplug the usb device. When the drive is connected directly to the pc, it will not boot from a cd. I would like to get my data, but I don't want to have to file for bankrupcy. I will be satisfied to know what the problem is. Don't tell me its toast. Everything is relative. Oh and I am not an hdd expert. I just like to know things. This drive was never dropped and has been used only sparingly. My data backup! Thanks, any pearls of wisdom will be greatly appreciated.

If data is important, send it to a pro. It should not be expensive at this point. Just do your research on a quality data recovery company.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Does BIOS report the correct capacity?

Did you configure the SATA controller for legacy or IDE compatibility mode in your BIOS setup? This should allow MHDD to see it.

If Spotmau is seeing a partition, then it must be accessing sector 0. This would suggest that your drive has weak heads or bad media.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks, guys. Mhdd does see it, but it says drive is busy, so it reports err at the top of the first screen. It never says the drive is ready

bios reports correct capacity.

Then I can't understand what Spotmau is seeing. :?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.