USB drive seen by Device Mgr but not This PC - Event ID 441/Kernel-PnP

Hello from London, and thank you in advance for any advice that helps save my life.

I recently upgraded a Dell Latitude E6400 (old, I know) to Windows 10 and (eventually) optimized for performance. Since the HDD in this laptop is only 75GB I stored most of my data on a Seagate 210GB USB2.0 drive. It was working perfectly for the year I've had it (and the two weeks since Windows10 install) and then a few days ago it can no longer be read by either of my two laptops (the other running Win7).

Device manager shows the drive, but it doesn't show up in This PC. I had also pinned it to the start menu and Quick Access. It has disappeared from the start menu and has a ? in front of the old drive allocation in Quick Access.

Summary of properties by tab:

1. General - Seagate USB 2.0 Cable USB Device / Device Status - This device is working properly
2. Policies - quick removal
3. Volumes - initially blank (dashes), clicked Populate, and the following, highly troubling data populated
Disk Disk 2
Type Unknown
Status Not initialized
Partition Not Applicable
Capacity 2097152 MB
Unallo Sp 0 MB
Rsrvd Sp 0MB
4. Driver - tried uninstalling and reinstalling, reinstalls most current driver each time but with same error (Event ID 441/Kernel-PnP)
5. Details - Disk drive
6. Events - same 3 events occurring every time I try to access the drive: a) device started (disk), b) device configured (disk.inf), and c) device not migrated. The information field reports that "

Device USBSTOR
\Disk&Ven_Seagate&Prod_USB_2.0_Cable&Rev_0148\2HC015KJ70 could not be migrated.

Last Device Instance Id: USBSTOR
\Disk&Ven_&Prod_USB_DISK_2.0&Rev_PMAP
\0701426E31B2DE40&0
Class Guid: {4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Location Path:
Migration Rank: 0xF000FC001001F120

When clicking on All Events I see that four things happen repeatedly:
1. !Error, Source: Kernel-PnP, Event ID-441
2-4. Information, K-PnP, 400, 410, & 420

I have screenshots of the XML and Friendly View data as well but hope that this is enough to determine if I will ever see my data again. It was my main hard drive and all of the documents that I need are there and inaccessible. Ironically I discovered this problem as I brought a 3TB drive home to be a master backup of everything.

What I've tried so far:

1. Ran cmd/admin and unhid nonpresent devices, deleted all i didnt need, rebooted, no change
2. Uninstalled driver and Seagate drive and restarted. Plugged in USB which installed the same (current) driver with no change in any of the above. Three attempts.

Any other suggestions sincerely appreciated!

Thank you,

Douglas

Bad news first: Your USB hard disk has a damaged partition record and so Windows cannot identify the structure of data in it.

Good news: There are recovery programs that bypass the partition information and search the disk sector-by-sector. After a rather lengthy process they show you a file tree with your data and then you can copy them to another disk. Yes, for obvious reasons they do not allow copying to the same disk, even if you have two or more partitions on it. You will need another disk with enough space for the backup. If you have or can borrow a second computer with enough disk space, you can extract the files there, then format your USB disk and copy the files back. There are many recovery tools for that if you do a little Google research. I use the GetDataBack which unfortunately have to register to be fully working. The unregistered version only shows the files but doesn't allow you to copy them! Probably there are free tools too, sorry I cannot suggest any right now.

I will give it a go. Thank you!

@spapakons,

I am running GetDataBack but the application, like This PC, is unable to see the USB drive. Is there a specific method you would recommend I follow to bypass the partition information that you'd mentioned?

Thank you,

Douglas

If the USB drive is detected in Disk Management, then GetDataBack should detect it too. I cannot suggest something else right now. When I say detected, I mean the device is recognized properly, Disk Management can see the actual size but the partition on it is unknown. If the size says 0 or you get a message to initialize the disk, then things are worse and I'm afraid you have to go to a professional for the recovery. Ask your local PC service first before going to very expensive data recovery companies.

GetDataBack at first ran for 24 hours and recognized my 200GB external hdd as a 2T drive with over 4 billion sectors. When finished it produced nothing but zeros. In other words, no data. However, I rebooted and attached the hdd and it showed up in explorer/This PC, with correct usage data underneath (around 100GB each used/free). Clicking on it revealed the folder structure as I left it, but from here it got depressing... there was nothing in any of the folders. Hovering over them provided a file count of 0. Then, more depressing, the laptop ceased to recognize the drive again in device manager and now I'm back to square 1. Any other wisdom is appreciated.
Douglas

Disk is failing. Be patient and try several times until you can finally recover the data. If you get any difficulties you may ask professional help. Go to your local PC shop to avoid paying a huge amount in dedicated companies. Agree a price with them beforehand so they won't overcharge due to the many hours needed to complete.

Sir, may i ask how to reformat the hard drive if i dont want to recover the data inside.. i just want to fix the hard drive..

If the disk is failing, you could store some data and risk lose them any time. However, you could try formatting the hard disk from Windows Explorer (open This Computer, right click on the respective drive and select Format). Quick format only erases the table of contents, so it might succeed and let you write new data on the disk. Full format erases all the surface of the disk (if it can complete, due to bad sectors). Alternativelly you could download a utility to do a Low Level Format (Google that) that erases the full disk bit-by-bit and restores it to factory default. This could also fix or mask some bad sectors, so it is a good idea to try. Of course it will take much longer then Full formal, so do it overnight.

Good day sir, the problem was I could not see the HDD drive in the My Computer/ This PC.. but it shows in the Device Manager with the properties "This device working properly" status.. "up to date driver".. I thought I could delete files or reformat the drive within the same apps (GetDataBack).. But thanks anyway Sir.. I have already solved the problem using Disk Management to assign a drive letter, and now Windows recognizes my drive. and do the formatting.. Thank a lot Sir.. ^_^