Via what method did you do in the 'copying of all your data' to external drive in question? (Naturally, many clone methods produce unbrowsable images)....
Yes sometimes that happens, especially if there's an issue with the drive being cloned.
If you were asking me, I was referring to rescuing what data you can to another drive,
not perform a 1:1 copy of it in it's entirety. That may indeed prove to be bad, although with a healthy drive, should pose no issue.
The thing for now I can suggest is to connect to a working Windows computer & if the drive shows up, click onto the partition to see if it can be repaired. Sometimes, as long as it's working, can be fixed, but not with a PC that has been crashing, that would do more harm than good & may be the reason why it's messed up now.
You can also try swapping cables, if USB 3.0, some retail packaged drives has a very slim connector going into the drive, I avoid these like the plague. Yet in your case, if a repair won't work, there's no harm in trying the cable first, if removable.
One other thing, it's never good to copy files onto an external when the system is crashing, writing to DVD's would had been safer for the external. If Zorin is running OK on the same computer now, it was likely a driver causing the crashes & a repair install of Windows 10, or running
sfc scannow in cmd as Administrator, along with 'DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth' first, either of these may had fixed your issue.
The reason why I say this is when the system crashes, whatever data being written is flushed upon the reboot, regardless the reason of crashing. So it's entirely possible that you may not have successfully saved all of your data. Meaning it would had been best to check the contents of the external before reformatting the drive for a Zorin OS install.
Plus making it a habit of not saving important files on the system drive, anything of importance goes to my Google Driver folder, and gets backed up to their cloud storage. Any reboot would restart the process, ensuring your data was synced.
We could had better advised you
before the Zorin OS install as to what actions to take, as there are tools, free of charge, to collect & ID system dumps for what was wrong with the W10 install. Now your options are more limited & the best you can hope for is #1, the external is OK by verifying on a known working Windows 10 (or 7/8.1) computer with a USB 3.0 port and #2, the data made it to the drive before any crashes took place.
If you can access the drive, you can copy (not clone) the data to another drive, DVD's, or whatever you have.
If not, first check the cable & being you're running Zorin OS now, I suggest you follow the advice of
Alabalcho, as I'm not an expert at Linux recovery tools. My specialty is being prepared at all times for disaster
before it strikes. Plus hardware, that's my cup of tea. While I can build a computer the way I or someone else wants to include installing the OS, security & software, am not advanced with recovery techniques other than the basics.
In closing, I suggest you backup frequently & keep important data off the system drive as generated. There's Dropbox for Linux, which gives you at least 2GB of cloud space at no charge, plus a service that works with GMail to sync up to 17GB of data (2GB for pics, 15GB for the rest) Or 100GB for $1.99/month. Your OS can be replaced as easily as loading the OS & installing, your data is priceless, otherwise you'd not be asking for assistance. As you now should see, it's not too late to start backing up your data, beginning today.
Good Luck!
Cat
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