I’m almost positive that my external hard drive is just dead at this point, but it’s behaving very oddly.
I’m fairly certain I need a new cable for it, for starters. My computer still makes the same “device detected” noise when I plug it in, but nothing shows up. It does show up in Disk Management, but this problem persisted when I used it on another laptop. When I switched out the cable with a newer one, however, the drive showed up in window’s explorer.
But then things got wonky.
When I click on the drive to view the files, it just shows me the loading cursor. And it keeps loading. Windows Explorer freezes. And then when I try to do anything - minimize the window, close it, open up task manager - the start bar completely disappears. The desktop goes black. The currently opened window stays in view, and I can still open Task Manager and run programs through that. But the desktop remains black until I disconnect the hard drive, and then everything shows up again.
This problem persists on both Windows 7 and Windows 10 PCs. Is this a Malware problem? Is my hard drive dead and I need to find a way to recover the data?
