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My Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive is beeping loudly and my PC won't read it (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago by Pacrat173@lemmy.ml to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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I have no clue what could have gone wrong as it was working fine last night but now it’s doing this. Any solution other than data recovery and a new hard drive ?

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Haven't heard of a drive beep unless it has a speaker in it. if it does check the manual for what the beep codes are.

If the noise is more like a metal tick or knock noise, that indicates mechanical failure and that is a very bad sign.

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I've heard of drives 'beeping' before, and it's not from a beeping speaker. This happens when the heads are stuck to the platters while the controller board is trying to move the head actuator arm.

When the heads get stuck like that, the voice coils of the actuator arm end up resonating high frequency sound much like a speaker.

The condition isn't good, that's for sure. I've seen where stuck heads can sometimes be unstuck by putting the drive in the freezer overnight, then plugging it up while still totally frozen.

But that trick doesn't always work, and sometimes it requires a little external force like tapping the corners of the drive on a desk to help free it up.

Or pay a data recovery center a butt load of money to open the drive up and salvage the data, either way is a compromise and the drive shouldn't be considered reliable even if the heads are freed up.