Those Seagate enclosures... they just plain suck, don't they? First you have to run Windows to turn off the sleep-feature (the one that parks the drive while data is being written to it). Now people are complaining that as the drives age they are having trouble mounting them and end up unplugging and replugging the drives repeatedly until they miraculously start working. This trouble is, I think, due to weak power from aging defective power boards.

The power problems might be easily dealt with -- just get a new enclosure and swap in your old drive -- except for the fact that FreeAgent enclosures are designed to be tamper-proof and are practically hermetically sealed.

Anyway, it turns out that there is a fix. One of my friends (Special thanks to Wishes to Remain Anonymous!!) told me he'd done it and I tried it and it works.

The trick is to remove the base of the enclosure and unplug the tiny LED power cable from the circuit board. No need to go digging into the guts of the thing. Just run a spudger (or if you don't mind getting it marked up, use a credit card) around the seam and pop a few tiny plastic tabs to get the bottom off.

This operation disables the orange activity light and gives the thing that tiny bit more power that it needs to get the drive spinning up properly.

I don't think that this is a permanent fix because something (a power-board?) is clearly defective and dying in these cases, but it might postpone cracking open the enclosure to rescue your drive (or throwing the whole thing out) for a few months.