Seagate FreeAgent Pro is misbehaving

[MrCrispy]

Is a 750GB FreeAgent Pro which was fine till yesterday. I only use it with usb since eSata is very flaky. Now the drive will show up fine but as soon as I start copying files - the speed is very slow (8MB/s), and it disappears after about 2GB have been copied. Connecting it again shows the data is still there.

The drive also appears fine in Disk Management etc, right till the point its gone. I tried using the Seagate firmware update tool and it can't even find the drive. What I suspect is the drive is just going to sleep after a certain amount of data is copied. I haven't seen any actual data loss - different folders are accessible.

Is there anything I can do to recover the data? I can only think of taking out the disk but apparently its pretty hard to do with these drives

 

[drescherjm]

I have seen this behavior more than a couple of times with seagate 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives. When you touch an area of the disk the drive goes completely offline until your powercycle the drive.

Check the SMART data using a program like CrystalDiskInfo.

 

[MrCrispy]

I'm not touching the drive at all, after the initial connect. It still seems to turn off (the light is on but drive is not present)