External Hard Drive takes forever to load

[desdades]

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.

 

[qazzi]

well first you have to know which is faulty the 'external enclosure' or the HDD itself, suggest remove the HDD from the enclosure then directly plug it in the SATA port(of course turn off the pc then plug it in). if you can access the drive without any problems that means the enclosure is the problem also while it is plug in the SATA port run some diagnostics on the drive (ie Seatool, WD data lifeguard) run all the test. just to make sure it's OK.