Dell Portable HDD not working

[NamanSharma]

I have a Dell 1 TB Portable HDD which suddenly stopped working the other day.. I got a new laptop and was using the hard disk when i unplugged and plugged it back it suddenly stopped working. I installed Windows 10 on the Laptop. The laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad 100. When i plugged in the External Drive the LED on it lights up, it shows up in My Computer as "Local Disk F" but when i open disk management it shows "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service" but doesnt go any further and disk management doesnt open. But the drive shows up in Device Management and it says that the device is working properly. I tried using Diskpart and it says the drive is in the UDF file system whereas it was NTFS. I tried using Linux is says there was a mounting error in Linux as well. After that i tried running the "chkdsk" command, and when i pressed enter nothing happened, no response. Nothing happens, after that i tried running "ntfsfix" using ntfs-3g in Linux but it told me to run "chkdsk" on windows but that hadnt worked. Then as a last resort i tried using the "dd" command to perform a low level backup but even that didnt work. Im not very familiar with Linux im just a beginner i tried all these troubleshooting steps after looking up things for hours. Im not sure what the issue is or what mistake i made so im posting this thread. Im a student, all my school related data, family pictures etc are all on that drive, please help me out. I need the drive alive.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there NamanSharma,

Have you tried using some data recovery tool on it? Here are some: https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893
As the drive doesn't even show under disk management, you will most probably not be able to access it.

The fact that the drive is not recognized under different OSes and taking into account all the things you've tried, it looks like there's something physically wrong with the drive.

One thing you can try is to attach the drive with a different USB cable to another computer. In case the issue persists and if the data stored on it is really important, I would suggest you to contact a data recovery company.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD