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: