[Yamer]

As with most of my technical issues, I turn to the CP community for help. I'll try to give as much information as possible. Thanks in advance for any help you're willing to offer.

First some specs: It is a USB 3.0 drive but I am using it on a 2.0. I am on Windows 7 Home Premium.

On Tuesday, July 3rd I purchased a 1 TB Seagate Expansion Portable USB 3.0 hard drive. For the first two days the drive worked fine, although I had some initial trouble during the plug-and-play installation of the driver software. Anyway, over the course of those two days I transferred some 550 GB of movies, pictures, and documents onto the drive to free up space. Then, Friday after work, I went to access some of the files and I found that my computer did not recognize the drive. The LED light came on, and I heard it clicking as though it was initializing, but it didn't show up in My Computer.

I tried plugging it into my netbook to see if it was a CPU issue. However, the driver software would not install and I also could not access the drive. I tried uninstalling the drivers and allowing it to re-install...but it consistently fails to install the driver software. Sometimes it installs it as 'Disk Drive', and sometimes it installs it as 'Seagate Portable USB' (I checked these in Device Manager). When I pull up the Disk Management tool, the drive does not appear. I tried using the SeaTools and Seagate Drive Settings tools but it can't find my drive...or it appears as 'Unknown'. I still have the 'Safe Eject' icon in my toolbar, and it reads as a 'Raptor 2.5" USB 3.0'.

I have attempted to contact Seagate, but of course they don't respond to issues on the weekends. I also plan to consult the retailer I purchased the drive at (BestBuy) to see what my options are. As I was in the process of transferring files over and finding space I don't have these files backed up anywhere else. While some of them are inconsequential, most are important and some of them are very discreet in nature...so if I have to find a way to recover these documents I would like to do it with as much professionalism and discretion as possible.

Anything you can suggest would be helpful. I am finding nothing on the Google Machine that relates to my problem. If you need any more information, just let me know.