So I have a Seagate 1.5 TB usb drive running on windows 7 and recently it decided that it doesn't like like me. When I try and open anything, it gives me the error, and that there is a problem with the i/o device error. Now I've looked all over the internet, and it seems this error has plenty of causes, and fixes, but I haven't found anything that works yet. Now my whole world is on that drive as it is my back up (problem was that I was too stupid to keep the original files). Seagate has a company that will take it to their lab, and recover data from it, but the price quote was $900, and it seems a little steep. So what I'm asking is, does anyone have maybe some magical fix I haven't tried, or know of a company that can recover my data for cheaper than $900?
Believe it or not, $900 is a very good deal to recover 1.5TB of data (that's why I use RAID). There are lots of little tricks that can be used to try to get the data back, but I would be hesitent to recomend most of them, as most of them could potentialy make the professional recovery impossible or incomplete.
One safe test is to connect the drive using another SATA cable to another SATA port...you might also want to switch the power cable if you have another one available. Anything else risks potential loss of data.