jonhb

I have a Seagate FreeAgent 250 GB External Hard disk to. I have windows vista, since 10 months ago this disk worked well, but none computer recognized my disk now (don't disconnect in hot, don't knock...). I tried with vista, xp and mandriva and the same result, disk no recognized but the light orange/yellow turn on. I changed the cable too.
Help me to recovery my information, thank you.

justpassingby

Hi jonhb and welcome to TSF !

Can you see the drive in disk management ? Right-click my computer => manage => disk management (under storage). Does the USB enclosure appear in the device manager ? Start => Control Panel => System and Maintenance => System => Device Manager. If there's some device with a yellow or red icon double-click it to see the error message and tell us about it.

If not then provided the issue is with the enclosure and not with the drive itself you can remove it from the enclosure and plug it inside a desktop computer or inside another USB enclosure to retrieve your data The drive inside should be a regular SATA hard drive. This would void the warranty though. There's this video on youtube :
YouTube - How to open Seagate Freeagent 500GB Case
From the look of it you may still need to remove something else on the drive to access its sata interface. If the enclosure is another model then the screws should be under the rubber feet. Ask some help from a computer savvy friend if needed.

You could also ask seagate support for more advices, here's the troubleshooting thread for the FreeAgent drives :
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/...&thread.id=954

Another possibility that wouldn't require you to take the enclosure apart would be to force mount the drive under a linux distro that supports NTFS (ubuntu for instance), this may give you access to your files if the enclosure still works and if the file system isn't damaged. I don't know the exact commands though, see if you have some friend who knows its way around Linux or ask here in the linux support section whether it can be done.