[SOLVED] External hard drive is not working

[mohamedashraf96]

Yesterday, I pluged my external hard drive to the pc, haven't used the drive for about 3 months, and it's not working, it's not showing in the windows explorer, when i opened disk managment , sometimes it pops up as an unalocated space some time it doesn't showup at all.

When it show up I tried to initialize disk it shows me a message the device is not ready, and i tried using different programs to initialize it and tried also disk part and all the procedures in this link but nothing is working https://www.diskpart.com/diskpart/initialize-disk-4125.html

 

[Grobe]

What model and how old? Does other usb equipment have problems too ?

 

[mohamedashraf96]

What model and how old? Does other USB equipment have problems too ?

Seagate SRD0NF1 1 TB
it's 3 or 4 years old
and no, other usb devices and hard drives work perfectly fine, I even tried to use the usb wire of my other hard drive which is working fine, and the problem still exists, so I believe it has nothing to do with the USB connections

 

[Grobe]

Have you connected that same drive to the same computer in the past, and can you remember if it worked perfctly back then ?

 

[mohamedashraf96]

Have you connected that same drive to the same computer in the past, and can you remember if it worked perfctly back then ?

Yeah it used to work fine on the same PC 3 months ago since I last tried it, and now I even tried to connect it to another PC, still it doesn't work

 

[mdd1963]

The odds of a USB external drive failing increase exponentially with any perceived increased value of the data on it....and particularly if this data is not backed up elsewhere.

Assuming you've tried more than one USB cable, and the drive does not function with two systems....

(Does the drive use a separate power adapter, or does it draw power from the USB cable? If a separate adapter, try another compatible one)

If still no luck, I'd decide now if the recovery of data is worth $300 or so...
https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/

If the data is not worth that much, you have nothing to lose with parts swapping with identical donor drives, etc...

 

[Grobe]

Yeah it used to work fine on the same PC 3 months ago since I last tried it, and now I even tried to connect it to another PC, still it doesn't work

So then the external hdd is most likely broken.