[jimmyphantom]

Soooo... Every time I connected a flash drive, external drive, or memory card, my computer turned the folders into shortcut files. I know how to turn them back into folders but it keeps on going back. I scanned my computer with malware bytes, spyware doctor, emisoft, avast!, and immunet and I have no viruses. Then I connected my Seagate 500gb external HDD to my computer. I went to my computer and the HDD was not listed. I went to the device manager and there it was... I read that I can use testdisk to fix this problem from the following link...
Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - Have you "lost" a hard drive, partition or files in your computer? I got to step B and it said "Disk capacity must be correctly detected for a successful recovery.
If a disk listed above has incorrect size, check HD jumper settings, BIOS
detection, and install the latest OS patches and disk drivers".. The seagate disk said 2199GB, when it is actually 500. So this is where I am stuck.. I am not very advanced with this stuff. I have no Idea what a jumper settings is. I have irreplaceable files stored on this drive that I cannot afford to lose. Any help would be greatly appreciate.:smile:

 

[alpenadiver]

Does the drive show up in "Disk Management" if so try to assign it a drive letter manually. What model is your seagate, if it is a new external it most likely is a SATA drive, and has no jumpers.

 

[jimmyphantom]

this is the one i have Amazon.com: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500 GB USB 2.0 Ultra-Portable External Hard Drive STAA500100 (Black): Electronics.... How would i manually assign a letter?

 

[TheGift73]

Make sure the Seagate external hard drive is connected to the computer, then do:

Right click on My Computer and choose Manage, then in the Computer Management window choose Disk Management on the left. You should now see your hard drives.

Select your Seagate External hard drive and right click on it and choose 'Change drive letter and paths'. In the next window that pops up, click the 'Change' button. In the next window (Change drive letter or path), use the drop down arrow next to 'Assign the following drive letter' and change it to another letter (like X or Y) and click OK. You will get a warning telling you that 'Some programs that rely on drive letters might not run correctly. Do you want to continue', hit Yes and that's it.

Don't do this on your system drives like your Local Disk (C. It's OK to do it on pen drives and external drives where you are just storing data. If you run programs from these drives and the computer needs to know where the program is located, then doing this may make those programs no longer work as the location path would have now changed from E: to Y: for example; if that makes sense. I assign my pen drives and external drives their own letters like this as in XP it had a habit of not seeing it in My Computer sometimes, and I guess I just kept on doing it in Windows 7.

 

[jimmyphantom]

In disk management my HD appears in the bottom part but not the top. So I connot right click it... What should I do next? It also says its 2048 gb when it is actually 500.

 

[TheGift73]

OK, couple of things. Go to the Seagate site and download the HDD Diagnostic tool for your HDD. This will run a few tests on it to determine whether there is anything wrong with the disk itself.

Second, I have attached two screen shots that show the two different ways to change the drive letter via Device Manager.

The second one is the way you previously tried and the first one, is to do it via Action>All Tasks>Change Drive Letter or Paths'

For each one, you must select the HDD (Seagate) by left clicking it. (you will see it's selected by the sloping lines that show on a selected HDD0