Dropped external drive still kinda working...?

[hartmde]

Recently, a friend of mine used my external drive and managed to drop it. I plugged it into my pc and it worked fine. I downloaded files from it like normal. When plugged into my pc the second time, some odd things happen. To begin with, my computer recognizes the drive and shows it in the "this PC" tab. Secondly disk manager shows the drive, but says it is 100% empty when i know it isn't. When my computer mounts the drive and loads it, it says it needs to be formatted. It does this as well if i try to open it.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, @hartmde!

Unfortunately, dropping the external might have damaged the hardware physically which is something that cannot be fixed. 🙁 I'd strongly recommend you try to access the contents of your external HDD from another computer as well and make sure you back up all the important data from it as soon as you can access it. This is the surest way to avoid the potential data loss headaches.

Another thing you should do is run its brand-specific HDD diagnostic tool and determine the health and SMART status of the drive.
I'd also advise you to go Disk Management in Windows and check how the drive is recognized there. Posting some screenshots would be really helpful, too.

Let me know how it goes! Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD