robertou1

Sorry I'm new and Today has been horrible. My 2 month old external Seagate (300GB USB2.0) hard drive no longer reads the 200 GB worth of files that were once on it. I purchased this device to back up a large collection of files and it seems as though all of them are gone. I went to access a file yesterday and the files were all gone and the folders in which they were in were gone and replaced with other folders that had different names under them with odd symbols and I hadn't touched it all day.

Today, the device isn't typically showing up in 'My Computer' (when it does show up, it does not have the same name it used to and also makes "My Computer" not respond and freezes) so I tried to go to Seagate's homepage and follow their troubleshooting but nothign worked and I have spent about 2 hours that i don't have on hold with their tech support line.

When I went to "Computer Management" the device is listed as having full capacity (279/279 GB 100%) but had previously read (85/279 GB...). I use XP and started using the external when I took it out of the box and plugged it in.

I also tried to reformat the drive knowing I would erase antying that was on there but since it already said 100% free space i figured I didn't have much to lose. The reformat stopped with an error message saying "Reformat could not complete"

I have been using the device for 2 months w/o any problems until now. The device used to be in autoplay mode when plugged in but that also does not happen anymoe. I also tried plugging the device into another computer and found that it also made his "My COmputer" not resond when I tried to open the device.

Am I totally screwed here or can the device still be used? I'm not expecting to retrieve any files that were once on there (luckily the original source still exists). Any help or suggestions on what to do would be greatly appreciated. Thanks