Question EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE STUCK ON BOOTING

Mar 4, 2021
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My 4TB hard drive recently won't boot properly. It powers up, the light comes on, I can hear the disk as usual, no unusual sounds, but then the light starts flashing as it always does but doesn't stop and shows up on windows explorer as an unknown drive without telling how much space is on it. It freezes up windows explorer, I can't restart the computer unless I unplug the drive, disk repair software stays stuck searching for new drives unless I unplug it and I can't access disk management unless I unplug it. I unplugged the device without safely ejecting which has caused this, so is there any fix I could do? i've tried in different USB ports, with different cables and on different systems, all with the same result! its in it own enclosure which i did remove it from to reveal it doesn't have a SATA connection at all. there are some irreplaceable files on this drive which I was in the process of backing up (what timing, eh?) - I've tried disk check in command prompt, it was sat for 3 days doing it, got to stage 5, got through almost all of the clusters and then just stopped disk checking. I did this twice with the same result again. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
 
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Does it work on other systems? Is this drive in some kind of enclosure? From personal experience, sometimes the enclosure (adapter board) can go bad but the drive itself is fine.
Unfortunately, many external hard drive enclosures are permanently sealed and difficult to get open without permanently destroying the enclosure (at the least). If you do manage to get the drive out you'll need the proper cable attachment to hook it to USB (or internally if it's a 3.5" size drive).
 
Mar 4, 2021
2
0
10
Try the external HDD on another system or two. If it's still not seeing the files then something died on that drive.

Irreplaceable files should be at minimum two locations on two different drives at all time.
tried that
also read my post, i was literally in the process of backing up
 

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