Seagate 500GB Portable Hard Drive Not Recognized Anymore!

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Hi, this is my first post on the forums, have been browsing for an answer all day but can't find exactly what I'm after.

I have 500gb Seagate external hard drive which I've had for about 2 years now, never any problems with it (running OSX 10.5.8). This morning I plugged it in and got the message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with the options to Initialize..., Ignore or Eject. I've seen other posts with people with the same problem but the outcome always seems to be different.

I tried it on a Dell Windows laptop, took a while installing the driver software before telling me there was an error installing it. Back on the macbook, the hard drive appears in Disk Utility but no options to repair etc. On another thread someone suggested typing in terminal:-

'sudo recover gpt /dev/disk#' and it returned the message 'gpt recover: unable to open device '/dev/disk3': Input/output error'

I have little or no knowledge of the ins and outs of hard drives and I'm stuck. Obviously need to get it working (if possible) a.s.a.p.

Is anybody able to help?

Thanks
 

RavingMac

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16Gb Mac Mini 2018, 15" MacBook Pro 2012 1 TB SSD
I encountered the same exact problem on a Seagate External HD. The only potential solution I have to offer (which I haven't tried yet myself) is to purchase and external HD case and swap the drive from the Seagate housing to the new housing, in case it is a drive interface problem rather than the drive itself.

Again, haven't got around to trying this yet, so not sure it will help. A suitable case would probably cost you around $30.
 
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15-inch Early 2008; Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; Memory 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 10.7.5
I'm sorry to say, but I never recommend Seagate/Maxtor drives for this very reason. I've had several of them fail on me in this exact same way throughout my life, and I'll never buy one again. Razor's suggestion is a good one though, I'd try that. Or if the drive came with a 3 year warranty, RMA that sucker and let Seagate deal with it.

Doug
 

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