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I have an older Seagate 120 GB HDD, that I'm connecting to my laptop with an IDE/SATA to USB adapter. The drive is easily 15 years old, but when I connected to the SATA/USB adapter (which is powered), it successfully showed on my Windows 11 as an external drive. I was able to browse the files, and went to copy a large amount of them over to my PC.

In doing the copy/pasting, the copy/paste froze on me so I exited, and disconnected the HDD.

Now, when I reconnect the HDD, it no longer shows in Windows Explorer, or the Disk Management screen. However, the drive is making its usual noises, and does show up in "Printers and Other Devices" as "Ext. HDD", so it's somehow registering with my computer.

How can I get Windows to see the drive again? I have already gone through the Device Manager, uninstalled all "Universal Serial Bus Controllers", and restarted the computer....still not showing up.

Did I somehow kill the drive? (I was just using it!) It's showing in Disk Management but I can't run Initialize Disk on it. I choose MBR or GPT and both give an error, "Request Failed due to a fatal device hardware error.". (Yes, that sounds bad, but is it really gone now? What corrupted it, I was just copy/pasting).

Edit: In the comand, doing wmic diskdrive get status returns:

Status
OK
OK
OK

Note: My internal SSD is split into two drives, and then I only have one external drive. So I think the above shows that the external drive is "OK"?

Edit: For what it's, I'm running EaseUS Data Recovery on it, and it's looking promising, but I wonder if there's a way I can "fix" the drive, as it's looking like it can find most of the data:

enter image description here

Edit2: The below is after checking DISK PART: enter image description here

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    so mechanical disks tend to run themselves to death. it is literally them doing their job that kills them. This disk is 10-12 years passed it's expected lifespan. its not entirely surprising that if you ask it to sprint a mile, it may go belly-up. try to read the SMART stats on the disk and see what they say.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Feb 2 at 21:35
  • @FrankThomas - So, despite it actually working (lots of data did get copied over), it may have hit its limit and is done? Again, I can hear it doing stuff, and am trying Tenorshare/EaseUS Data Recovery to see if it can find anything,, and some stuff is showing up, all preceded with "File Name not Found"
    – BruceWayne
    Commented Feb 2 at 21:37
  • Keep in mind that a drive is not just a head and platters. There's also a controller in there and some other chips. If one of the chips died, the controller may still very well move the head and stuff, but windows may not be able to recognize the drive. You mention you use an IDE adapter. Double check that its not the adapter that broke. Can you connect another harddisk to it and test?
    – LPChip
    Commented Feb 2 at 21:44
  • @LPChip - I hooked up another drive, and it detected it as I would expect. "EaseUS" data recovery is finding lots and lots of files, but has a folder "Lost Files" and "File Name Lost", so maybe it corrupted a few filenames but the drive is okay?
    – BruceWayne
    Commented Feb 2 at 21:55
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    well, filenames are not part of the files data, but are instead stored in the Filesystem Metadata tables, along with things like parent directory, ACLs, attributes, etc. Since that data is all in one place, its possible that all filename and directory tree info is gone. that said, it is good news that the disk shows up, even if its filesystem cannot be mounted. Check the SMART stats before you do to much so you can get a bead on the health status. if its going bad, make your top priority to take an image off the disk so you can attempt recovery without risk it will mechanically/finally die
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Feb 2 at 22:02

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