External hard drive not working

my 1tb HDD used to work fine before, but the other day i plugged it in my computer, it shows up like in the image, but when i want to access it i can't, i tried changing the cable/port/computer but nothing. and btw it works fine on my smartphone, but on computers it is inaccessible. is there something i could do to save my HDD? thanks!

>>79325 Open it from a linux distro to save your important data somewhere else. Reformating it might make it work again, but you should consider that it might die at any moment.

>>79814 An "external" hard drive is just a plastic box with a normal 2.5" or 3.5" harddrive inside connected to a sata to usb converter. If you've tried everything else then the last thing to try is breaking open the plastic case and connecting to the harddrive directly with sata. If you're lucky it's just the sata to usb convertor that is broken.

>>79831 >An "external" hard drive is just a plastic box with a normal 2.5" or 3.5" harddrive inside connected to a sata to usb converter. Until it's soldered. Seagate is the only one known for not soldering, so OP is lucky. >>79814 At least state your OS and the exact error. OS is probably Windows 7, so what exactly is the error? Also I am sorry to say that, but most people (me included) here don't know how to debug windows, because we are linux freaks. Do you mind making a liveCD of a linux distro to do some (meek) debugging?

aw btw there's crystaldisk or whatever for windows which queries SMART info from your disk. Might as well be the first step.

OP why did you have to disappear like this...

>>79814 hello guys op here, i changed the sata converter but nothing, i am not a Linux expert like you guys so i really don't know what some of you are talking about lol. i will try to save my files by sending them to my smartphone since that is the only place where the HDD is working. meanwhile, i will be watching this thread and trying other solutions and thank you guys for caring. BTW, my hard drive is not making any strange noises so that's a good sign??!

>>79850 Check device manager, what does it say about your disk? If it says it's working fine, then https://www.wikihow.com/Partition-Your-Hard-Drive-in-Windows-7 to see if partitions are recognized. They most likely are. Next, check if filesystems are recognized. I suppose it's just broken filesystem. https://www.system-rescue.org/ on a usb stick would be very helpful. If you knew the first thing about using linux, of course.

>>79850 I think what>>79822 and >>79839 were suggesting was creating a live boot of a linux distro without actually installing said distro? Example: Follow a youtube tutorial to create a bootable USB (try linux mint, its very straightforward) The tutorial will usually then show you how to restart your PC, booting from the linux USB rather than Windows. From here, instead of continuing the actual installation process try accesssing the HDD from the file manager (like you would with Windows) to see if it works this way. As long as you don't actually install Linux you should boot back to your usual OS upon restarting the computer

>As long as you don't actually install Linux quite dangerous. linux is always there ready to leap at you when you least expect it. i wouldn't recommend booting linux even for a few minutes if you can avoid it, just not to catch it. once you got linux in your head there's no way back