External Drive not being recognized......

[carrdaro]

Seagate Free Agent Go external drive 500GB was using for my time machine
Lights up makes noise it even shows up in disk utility but not on desktop or in finder
I have a MacBook pro 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR@ SDRAM
Mac OS X 10.5.8
Was working a month ago, not now?

 

[qjmoss]

Well..

With the information you have given us.. we're going to have to start at the top.


In the month that it did work, 'till now.. has any physical damage been done to it, such as falling off a desk, getting bumped, whateva.

Second, Have you reformatted it lately? If you have, what did you format it too.

And last.. and probably the most helpful. Try using Prosoft Data Rescue and recovering your data and back it up, on to your internal if possible or whatever ya want, and reformat your external completely.

And if this doesn't help at all, you most likely your HD has failed, but.. I'm sure there is someone out there that can give you more steps to follow.

I'm sorry I'm not extremely skilled in this and can just tell you whats up.


Good luck, and let me know


-note
A program that I find useful when i'm dealing with my internal and external drives is TechTool Pro 5, it will give you some pretty good descriptions on whats going on with it.

 

[dashcs]

Before you start to freak out.

Step 1 should be this.

If Disk utility sees the external but your finder does not.
Inside Disk utility,select your external HD and click on repair disk

If there errors and it can't repair.
You will need to reformat the external.
If that fails-time to get a new external HD