I have a USB 3 500GB Seagate Expansion Portable Drive (2.5") that would be around 12 months old. It has stopped working, won't mount on my Mac or even start spinning. I have resigned myself to the fact that it is buggered but thought I'd have a bit of a play with it to see what was wrong and if I can salvage any data. I opened the case and it contains a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500 GB drive. I thought hopefully it is an issue with the SATA-USB interface in the case so I removed the hard drive and put it in a hard drive dock. The drive now spins up but still doesn't mount. In Disk Utility (Mac) the main drive is listed in black in the list on the left so it is registered by the computer (nothing at all was listed when it was still in the case) but the single volume is greyed out. I tried repairing the drive but that failed. I tried erasing the drive but that failed ("Cannot unmount disk").
Any suggestions on how to repair this? I don't know how to tell the difference between hard drive problems that are fixable and ones where you can save yourself a heap of time and just throw it away because it will never work again...
Any suggestions on how to repair this? I don't know how to tell the difference between hard drive problems that are fixable and ones where you can save yourself a heap of time and just throw it away because it will never work again...