Is my hard drive dead? HDD doctor required!

[Den10]

Just booted a WD elements external hard drive from long term storage and windows is not picking it up. 

 

The hard drive has been assigned a random letter and does not display its usual name. It shows up in the “This PC://” as “Local Disk (H:)”, but if clicked, windows explorer freezes up until the hdd is disconnected.

 

The drive definitely spins up and I can feel and hear it running. The white led blinks twice every second.

 

I tried disk management, but it hangs forever at connecting to virtual disk service. Diskpart and list disk commands do not work until hdd is ejected from usb port, so I cannot assign another letter.

 

It shows up under device manager as WD Ext HDD 1021 USB Device and is working properly, but does not have any volume properties listed.

 

I have used different cables and power supplies, and tried it on both mac OS High Sierra and windows 10.

 

Model: WDBAAU0020HBK-01(2 TB HDD)

Length of ownership: 4 years, but used only as archival storage (probably less than 300 hours of life time use, with ~100 times of read/write spin ups)

 

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Bacon soup]

can you take it out of external enclosure and connect to motherboard via sata?

[Vishera]

What does the S.M.A.R.T of the HDD say?:

https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Instead of worrying about if it is dying or not, back it up immediately! Then you can replace it now or later. That way, if it dies before you replace it, you won't lose any data.

[Palden]

2 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Instead of worrying about if it is dying or not, back it up immediately! Then you can replace it now or later. That way, if it dies before you replace it, you won't lose any data.

That might be a problem as already the drive isn't getting mounted correctly, it actually sounds like his HDD controller has given up the ghost from the sounds of it.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 hours ago, Palden said:

That might be a problem as already the drive isn't getting mounted correctly, it actually sounds like his HDD controller has given up the ghost from the sounds of it.

Good point (so much for me responding when still half asleep). In that case, he would be best off to stop powering up the drive and send it out for professional data recovery. Continuing to try to access it could cause even more damage.

 

I still advise backing it up once he gets his data back (if he gets it back) and backing up any other drives he might have.

[bronsonj]

what i would do is boot to hirens and back up a bit by bit copy of the drive and then once thats done see what the smart data says and see if you can use parted magic to reallocate any current pending sectors 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

5 hours ago, bronsonj said:

what i would do is boot to hirens and back up a bit by bit copy of the drive and then once thats done see what the smart data says and see if you can use parted magic to reallocate any current pending sectors 

Sigh! This comes right after I said, "Continuing to try to access it could cause even more damage."