I've got an old hard drive that's probably 3 to 4 years old. It used to work perfectly fine until a few months ago. Whenever I plug the hard drive in, the hard drive lights up (indicating that it gets power and is being read). However, nothing shows up on My Computer. I do get occasional "Would you like to format the hard drive?" prompts (which does nothing) but aside from that, only after 10 minutes or so will a new "Local Disk (G" pop up (which is strange since I'm sure its named after my surname).
The problem gets worse from here on. Double-clicking or right-clicking on that "Local Disk (G" will cause explorer to not respond or on worse case scenarios, crash. This means I cannot open the drive, view its properties, nor format it. Other drives work perfectly fine. I've tried opening Disk Management, but information doesn't load up as long as the external hard drive is plugged in. When plugged out, everything works perfectly fine so I'm convinced that nothing is wrong on the computer's side. I've also tried waiting it out for the drive to load. The longest I've waited is almost 24hours, and the same thing still happens.
Would I still be able to use this drive? I would gladly format this as there's not much important files in it.
The problem gets worse from here on. Double-clicking or right-clicking on that "Local Disk (G" will cause explorer to not respond or on worse case scenarios, crash. This means I cannot open the drive, view its properties, nor format it. Other drives work perfectly fine. I've tried opening Disk Management, but information doesn't load up as long as the external hard drive is plugged in. When plugged out, everything works perfectly fine so I'm convinced that nothing is wrong on the computer's side. I've also tried waiting it out for the drive to load. The longest I've waited is almost 24hours, and the same thing still happens.
Would I still be able to use this drive? I would gladly format this as there's not much important files in it.