Unfixable external harddrive?

[harrypotterfan293]

My brother gave me an external harddrive to fix, and I'm at a loss on how he messed it up. Plugging it in gives the "This disk is broken, fix it" thing but when doing that it just freezes, and trying to do anything in Disk Management or just formatting it in file explorer doesn't work. It's formatted in FAT32, a 1TB Seagate external hdd. Any suggestions help

 

[hang-the-9]

Well if the drive is bad, it's bad. If you can't format it or do anything with the partitions, means it'd a bad disk. Did you try removing it from the enclosure and connecting to another one or directly do a desktop sata port?

 

[harrypotterfan293]

Well if the drive is bad, it's bad. If you can't format it or do anything with the partitions, means it'd a bad disk. Did you try removing it from the enclosure and connecting to another one or directly do a desktop sata port?

Yeah I tried that, not recognized at all. Is the drive just dead?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Likely.

 

[USAFRet]

It's dead. Drives do that sometimes.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Sometimes backup drives fail before the drive they are backing up.

 

[USAFRet]

Sometimes backup drives fail before the drive they are backing up.

That's why a backup is a second (or third) copy.
Not the only copy.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I live dangerously and dont backup my data. i do reccomend backups if you have important data unlike me. Likely your drive is dead. If you need some of the data recovered you there are companies like drive savers that recover your data for a high price.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

On a second note i might backup my drives now lol.

 

[USAFRet]

Backups are what you do before the BadThing happens.

Last month, one of my SSDs died suddenly. 960GB SanDisk. No warning, nothing. Dead.
During a simple reboot, it disappeared. New cable, different port, Windows, Linux, external SATA dock...nothing worked.

605GB data gone gone gone.

Why did it die? Don't know, and mostly don't care.

Put in a new drive, click click...605GB data 100% recovered. Exactly as it was at 4AM that morning, when the last automated backup ran.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Very true. I guess i cant count on my drives being reliable even though both of my drives are solid state. At least hdd usually show warnings before death where ssds dont. Ill break out an old hdd for backup.

 

[USAFRet]

Very true. I guess i cant count on my drives being reliable even though both of my drives are solid state. At least hdd usually show warnings before death where ssds dont. Ill break out an old hdd for backup.

Couple years ago, I had a 5 week old 3TB WD drive go from perfect to dead in about 36 hours.
All drives are suspect, right from Day 1.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Computers are unpredictable.