tremaine
Topic Starter
Hello, happy holidays. I have a major emergency here. For the 2nd time in a week, all of a sudden my Seagate external drive has suddenly gone from recognized to unrecognized. All of a sudden the files have disappeared, although when the crisis began the drive was still showing at Start > My Computer on mouseover and the correct gigabytes were still showing.
The last incident, almost a week ago, self corrected after 90 minutes of an unbootable computer; This was apparently due to an online scan unmounting one or both of the drives (external and internal).
In this incident there was a bizarre appearance of windows installer just before I lost access to the data on the Seagate External. Naturally I am worried I am the victim of some sort of massive hacking attack, although I have Comodo Firewall, Windows Defender, and Avira Anti-Vir and none of them reported anything suspicious at that time.
The crisis right now I need help with is that when I reboot the computer hangs on the very first (pre-boot-up) screen for several minutes (5 to 10 minutes) and then it boots up normally. However, the Seagate (L Drive) is not recognized at all. ( I've tried three times to reboot and the same thing is happening.
Another simulaneous crisis is that the Seagate Drive itself has been on and spinning during the whole crisis with the main hard drive / computer. (It's supposed to temporarily shut itself off during reboots (and shut itself off when the main computer is shut off).
Hopefully the two failures are related because otherwise I may have just lost access to the data on the external unless I pay a lot of money for very complicated data recovery software.
I want to pull the plug on the Seagate so that I can try to get the computer to recognize it when the Seagate is powered back up, but I am afraid to pull the plug for fear of damaging some drive settings (the details of which are way over my head, but all I know is that I am trying to avoid losing access to my data as I am aware that can happen.) Should I (after shutting the main computer down just to be on the safe side) pull the plug on the Seagate and turn on only the main computer and then turn on the Seagate? Is it safe to do so given that the drive is unrecognized? Have I already lost access to the data if in fact I have?
In other words, given the fact that the Seagate is not recognized by the computer, is it safe to turn the external Seagate off by pulling the power on it (especially when the main computer is shut down again)? And then boot up the main and later on boot up the external?
OR IS THERE A WAY to get the external drive recognized without rebooting or pulling the plug on anything???
I am first going after the recognition crisis and then I'll deal with the general boot up crisis.
Anyone, please help.
Thank you very much Doug. I wanted someone backing me up in my decision to cut the power for some moral support in case the data had been lost. But had the data been lost there must be a 99.9999% chance it would have been lost prior to the point I came on here asking for help
It was a fairly obvious thing that you could safely cut the power, but there was A LOT on the line because I back up data only 4 times a year and my last backup was in mid November. I know; that is a bad habit there.
Well, now on to attack the root of this failure.
Again, what is happening is that all of a sudden the external drive loses it's recognition.
And then there is the boot up problem on the main computer. But it is now considered absolutely certain that these two problems are completely intertwined; exactly how or why is way over my head. When I booted up the main computer with the external completely shut down it booted up completely normally. (Then I plugged in the external and it was recognized normally as already alluded to.)
Just prior to (or maybe at the same precise time) when recognition of the files and folders in the external drive was lost the windows installer made an appearance from out of nowhere. (I certainly was not installing anything.) I cancelled it but it took about 3 minutes to completely kill the process because CPU usage was spiking to 100 (according to task manager). Later, the Windows installer process (and all other processes) were shut down in a normal boot down.
Also, I swear I saw for a fraction of a second the black command box appear (when the Installer was still hung up). I'm thinking that malware was being inserted into my computer at that precise moment.
More broadly, I am beginning to suspect that criminal hackers are attempting to gain control over my computer! You read all these seemingly crazy stories about computers having their data stolen by hackers and about computers being used as drones and you say to yourself that those stories must be fantasy or at least extremely rare. But I honestly am starting to suspect that a criminal hacker is trying to gain control of my computer (albeit probably unsuccessfully given that I am armed to the teeth defensively)
Regardless of the root cause (which anyone is way more than welcome to give information and/or opinions about) would system restore (back to BEFORE the FIRST incident occurred possibly solve this? Is System Restore at least worth a try? Let me ask that first.