All,

I have external 1TB Drive, I am connecting it to my laptop using SATA USB adapter. The issue is, win8.1 does not see it. the tools like sea tool see it without any issues. what can I do to make it appear as a normal external drive in my computer. I did try disk utilities and the assigned drive letter is grayed out.

Regards,

Shah

Noticed any odd behavior prior to complete failure?

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

The drive was actually a NAS Drive which stopped showing up on my network. I open the case and found out it was barracuda... and than connected to laptop using the USB adapter. Win 8.1 did pop an error when I connected the USB saying driver is not installed properly etc.

Lighter issues for starters are bad sectors and firmware.
Suggest checking drive with MHDD. See behavior, SMART, etc.

If you need the data of of it, careful how much you tamper with it. 7200.12 is sensitive and can get worse by the second.

Also, as a NAS based drive, the file system is likely XFS (or ext(x)) for the main data volume. Since Win does not support XFS, it may explain why the drive does not mount.

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

I have been able to run seatool scan which took 30 hours to complete but it came out with flying colors. I will try MHDD.
How do I change the file system - why does seagate recovery tool sees it as FAT12?

Should not be FAT12. Sounds like the drive may have been subject to a "fixboot" repair. Do you recall trying this?

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

Unfortunately, I don't know what that is? What I have done is used seatools to scan, which came out without any errors.

Sounds like plural, more than one utility...
Either way, seems feasible your partition info may have been compromised.
If the drive's SMART and scan in MHDD support drive is healthy, you may look into some scanning software like R-Studio, etc.

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

I used plural partly because 1) I had to use the seatool multiple times to finally complete the test and 2) Run the scan using seagate recovery tool and in both instance scans were performed by the applications.

I downloaded R-Studio and it does not make any sense to me? Also, what is SMART?

BTW: my drive is still spinning and can be see in seatools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
Sounds like you are not very experienced. Perhaps, should send to a specialist.

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