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My hard drive has suddenly stopped working. When it is connected, it shows up in “My Computer” under hard disk drives but Windows Explorer gets stuck in a never-ending attempt to read the drive (see image).

While the hard drive is connected, I cannot open disk management or a command prompt with administer privileges to do a dskchk. If I double-click on the hard drive to browse its contents, Windows Explorer will just stop responding. It won’t even give me an error message about the drive not being accessible or something like that. It will just keep trying to access the drive.

Also, if the drive is connected to the computer, the computer will not boot. It just gets stuck on the drive recognition page while it keeps trying to access the drive.

I tried taking the drive out and connecting it through a SATA to USB adaptor but I get the exact same result.

Any ideas on what the problem might be (platters, board, etc.) and how to fix it or at least recover data from the drive? I should also mention that the drive is not making any strange noises; just its normal spinning noise.

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  • Data recovery services should be used, they can examine the drive, to determine what’s wrong with it. Based on the behavior description, telling you what’s wrong specifically, won’t be possible without an examination of the drive
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 22, 2018 at 19:34
  • First you need to download and run GSmartControl (gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.io/home/index.php/Downloads) and check SMART attributes of misbehaved drive. If SMART parameters 5, 196, 197 are greater than 0 then read this: superuser.com/a/1342230/164837
    – Alex
    Commented Jul 22, 2018 at 20:05

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If the disk is physically damaged, please take it to the data recovery center for a manual repair. If not, try the steps in the link to fix the issue.

https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/external-hard-drive-not-responding.html

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For some season, I was able to access the drive using a Linux live disc. I created an empty text file on the hard drive (which I guess would have updated the file system) and went back into Windows which at this point had no problem accessing the drive. Weirdest HDD related problem I have ever dealt with.

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