Brand new drive.
I plug it in, it is recognized.
So far so good.

But I decide, in my finite wisdom, that I want to create some partitions to match the size I will need for different computers that I'm going to use this drive as a back up for.

So I go to disk management in Win10, I see the drive. I shrink the size by 500gb (to more than cover for a 256gb drive). The next thing I can remember, doctor, is that the drive was no longer available.

At first the HD was still "seen" in disc management, (but no longer "seen") as a lettered drive in the file manager lists. It said I had to initialize the drive. I have tried to do this repeatedly, but I keep getting an error that says drive failure. Also, ominously it says that the drive is 0mb in size, so if I tried to skip initializing and try to partition, it says it can't partition anything under 10gb.

I have downloaded two different programs - I've since uninstalled them and forget their names - that are partition managers. One specifically advertised as good to rebuild the MBR. I used that. And it looked like it was successful in doing that, but it didn't result in the drive being available.

In fact it might have made the problem worse in that now disc management doesn't even list the drive at all.

What is also curious is that I downloaded Seatools for Windows. I start it up and it goes to look for available drives. When it gets to looking at the USB port (I only have one, on a Surface Laptop 2) it stalls and then goes to "Not responding". Then if I pull the cable from the drive out of the USB port, SeaTools finishes its work as if nothing had happened. And of course, doesn't list the drive.

So the question is what happened? Why would the drive be completely disabled after I tried to shrink the volume? Could it have shrunk to zero?
Is the drive now completely dead?

It was empty so no data loss, and only cost $90. But would like to know if there is a cheap easy fix before I go buy another one.

Faulty drive, return for a new one. Even if you formatted and wiped all the partitions, some software should have seen the drive ID, even if it was unallocated.

But it worked up until the second I shrank the volume. How would that "break" it or make it faulty.
And the drive has been seen since I shrank the volume, only sporadically.


It's also been sitting (unused) for a year since I purchased it. So I doubt it is under warranty at this point.

This thread can close. Seagate has offered to replace the drive.