Context
My aunt gave me a 3TB Seagate external USB drive for Christmas. It takes a little jiggling (power cycle) to work on my Mac, where it shows up as a perfectly functional NTFS partition, but in Windows 7, it doesn't even show up in Device Manager. If it showed up there, and in diskpart
, I'd have no trouble getting it to work as a removable drive in Windows. But alas, Device Manager doesn't show it.
The drive did show up once in Device Manager, with a yellow exclamation mark. When I connected the drive, Windows raised a system tray balloon error about the device failing to update the driver. I tried manually updating the driver, as well as uninstalling the driver and repeating from scratch, to no avail. Now the Seagate doesn't show up at all in Device Manager.
TL;DR. The Seagate white LED is on. The drive functions as an NTFS partition in Mac, but in Windows, it doesn't even show up in the Windows Device Manager.
Troubleshooting
- I tried rebooting. Didn't help.
- I tried showing hidden devices in Device Manager. Didn't help.
- I tried deleting all USB devices in Device Manager and then rebooting. Didn't help.
- I tried unplugging the Seagate drive completely. Didn't help, though it was necessary to work with my Mac.
Google searches don't yield good results; most USB drive problems are easily fixed with diskpart
-> select volume ABC
-> assign letter=X
, so 95% of Google results are that.
However, one tutorial suggested malware may be hiding USB drives. I'm installing Avast and checking if this is the problem.
Also, a tutorial recommended using a Windows installation disc to repair Windows, which would fix any corrupted USB drivers. The Asus laptop didn't come with a Windows disc but fortunately I was able to find one.
Specs
- Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB (PN:
9ZQ2P6-500 3 TB
, though the Seagate website refuses to recognize the number in order to search for driver downloads) - Windows 7 Home SP1 x64
- Asus A5SE laptop