Inaccessible external hard drive

Question

I have a 2TB external hard drive I've had connected to my router for the past 2 years. Recently, I noticed I wasn't able to access files on it. However Windows did show that it was successfully on the network. I restarted the router, the drive itself and was unable to see the contents of the drive. It just continued to show "This folder is empty" when I opened it.

I took it off the network and plugged it directly into my Windows 10 computer one of 2 things is happening:

• It's recognizing this is the same drive from the network and thus not considering it a local/removable disk
• The drive is shot and it's not even registering when I connect it to my PC.

What steps can I take to verify the drive integrity?

Disk 3 is the drive in question

Answer 1

Because you're saying

It's recognizing this is the same drive from the network and thus not considering it a local/removable disk

I'm not sure if Windows is really seeing it or looking for it or not. Changing the windows network drive settings might help, and looking at a "windows hardware log" might help...

But I'm much more familiar with linux so I'd try booting a live linux (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, etc) and once it's booted and running:

1. then plug in the USB hard drive

2. watch for changes in lsblk and dmesg &/or the /var/log/syslog file

   • If nothing shows up in dmesg or /var/log/syslog , that's very bad. The drive, or at least the USB adapter, appears to be dead. Trying Ratwrangler's answer to plug the drive directly into a sata port is a decent next step (unless it's under warranty or exchangeable).

If several lines mentioning "usb" show up, then it's not completely dead. Look for a new device in lsblk. Drives are often named /dev/sdX [X being a letter in a-z] and partitions are a number, like /dev/sdX1

Mounting a partition should be a one-click operation with most file managers, or using gnome-disk-utility (aka "Disks") or in a terminal (read-only with the -o ro flag):

sudo mkdir -vp /media/X1
sudo mount -v -o ro /dev/sdX1 /media/X1

If all your files are there, then it's not the drive's problem. If only a few files are there, you could try to recover the missing files with a program like testdisk / photorec

Answer 2

I have had this happen with more than one external hard drive. I assume when you connected it to the computer, you used it as an USB drive. If you can open the external drive case, remove the drive, and attach it as a local SATA drive, you will probably find that all your data is there. In all of my cases, the SATA to USB circuitry failed. It would respond as an external drive, but would only pretend to read the hard drive.