There is a version of this article on every recovery site in the country and most of them are written to make you give up and phone. This one tells you what you can genuinely do yourself, and where the line is.
Everything about what you should do next depends on this, and it is not a hard question to answer.
If the drive is making a noise it did not used to make — clicking, beeping, grinding — then it is a physical failure and there is nothing you can safely do yourself. No software helps. Every attempt makes it worse. Unplug it and stop. That is not us protecting our fee; it is the actual situation, and the difference between a drive that clicked for two minutes and one that clicked for two days is the difference between a full recovery and a partial one.
If the drive is silent, or sounds completely normal, then it may well be a logical problem — and there are things you can try, in a specific order, without risk. That is the rest of this page.
The most common cause of "my external drive died" is a cable that has been coiled into a rucksack four hundred times. A failing USB cable can deliver power but not data, which produces a drive that spins and is invisible.
For a mains-powered desktop drive. External PSUs fail more often than drives do. If you have another with the same voltage and connector, try it.
Rear ports, not front panel, not a hub. Then a completely different machine. This tells you whether the problem is the drive or the host.
Windows + X, then Disk Management. If the disk appears here but not in Explorer, that is useful and specific information: the hardware works and the file system does not.
If the disk shows a healthy partition with no letter, right-click and assign one. Occasionally that is the whole problem.
If none of that works and the drive is silent, you are now in territory where the next steps carry risk. Read on carefully.
Recovery software is a real tool and it genuinely works — on the right problem. The problem is that it cannot tell you whether yours is the right problem, and it will happily run for eleven hours on a drive it is actively killing.
It works on: deleted files, a formatted partition, a corrupted file system, a wiped partition table — on a drive that is physically healthy.
It destroys things on: a drive with failing heads or bad sectors. The software has no concept of a dying drive. It hits a bad sector, retries, retries again, and keeps hammering — and on a drive with a marginal head, those retries are what turn a recoverable disk into an unrecoverable one. We see this constantly, and the customer's honest account is always the same: "I left it running overnight."
1. Never install it onto the drive you are recovering from. The installer writes hundreds of megabytes onto the exact disk whose free space you are trying to preserve.
2. Never write the recovered files back to the same drive. Recover to a different disk. Always.
No. And this is the single most contrarian thing on this page, because "shucking" is all over the internet as a diagnostic step.
The theory is sound: an external drive is an ordinary disk plus a USB bridge board, the bridge fails more often than the disk, so take the disk out, plug it into a SATA port, and see. When it works, it works beautifully.
The problem is that many external drives encrypt on the bridge board. WD My Passport does it by default, with no password, so most owners have no idea it is happening. The disk holds ciphertext; the key lives on the board. Take the disk out and it will spin up, be detected at the right capacity, and show you complete gibberish — and now you believe the data is destroyed, when in fact it is fine and you have simply separated it from its key.
If you have already done this: do not throw the enclosure away. Keep both halves. The key can usually still be recovered from the board.
Immediately.
That is bad sectors, and software will make it worse.
Usually a drive failing under load.
This is the real test. If losing it is genuinely a problem, the correct number of DIY attempts is zero, because every one of them costs you options.
Free diagnosis. £300 + VAT flat for a single external drive. No fix, no fee.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.