Unable to interact with external harddrive.

[crizzl]

I have this external harddrive that windows recognizes but whenever I try to interact with it in anyway it just gets stuck in the interaction. I can see it popping up in "My Computer" but if I try to double click or right click on it, it just gets stuck and nothing happens. If I try to uninstall the drivers for the drive via device manager it gets stuck, and if I try to open up disk management it gets stuck on "connecting to virtual disk service". If I reboot without connecting the harddrive I have no problem accessing disk management. Additionally whenever I try to shutdown my computer when the drive has been connected it just hangs on "shutting down". This all started when I booted yesterday and when I got into windows it asked me to format the drive, which I didn't, and since then I have been unable to interact with it in any way.

It seems kind of impossible to troubleshoot since I can't really interact with it, but hopefully there's some smart people on here that has some good ideas.

 

[hang-the-9]

Sounds like the drive is bad. Test it with another system, if it's out of warranty, remove it from the enclosure and try it connected directly to a desktop with a SATA cable. Some external drives have custom connections though and this may not work with all of them.

 

[crizzl]

Sounds like the drive is bad. Test it with another system, if it's out of warranty, remove it from the enclosure and try it connected directly to a desktop with a SATA cable. Some external drives have custom connections though and this may not work with all of them.

I should probably have mentioned that it also happens on my laptop where it's unfortunately the same thing, my bad. I've removed it from the enclosure but unfortunately it's still fastened in a sort of plastic casing with security torx which means I can't get it out of there without using violence at the moment.

 

[crizzl]

Well I think it's pretty safe to say that my external harddrive is bricked. I tried connecting it directly with a SATA cable and it made my computer unable to boot. It says "Starting Windows" but just hangs there for an indefinite amount of time. As soon as I disconnected it I was able to boot again.