External hard drive recovery.
Often it's not the drive.

Nothing in File Explorer, nothing in Disk Management, maybe no light on the enclosure.

Before assuming the disk is dead, understand what an external drive actually is: a normal internal hard drive, a small circuit board that translates USB to SATA, and a plastic shell. That bridge board is the cheapest and most heat-stressed component in the assembly, and it fails a lot — while the drive behind it stays perfectly healthy.

Free things to try, in order: a different cable, a different port directly on the machine rather than through a hub, a different computer, and its own power brick if it has one. Then check Disk Management or Disk Utility, because a drive that appears there but not in Explorer is a file system problem rather than a hardware one.

If the drive spins up but nothing detects it, the bridge is the strong suspect. Those recoveries are among the cheapest there are, because the platters were never touched.

Stop reading and unplug it.

Mechanical noise means moving parts are in a state they should not be in. Clicking is the read heads failing to find their calibration position and resetting over and over. Beeping is the motor straining against a spindle that will not turn. Grinding is the worst of the three — it often means a head is dragging on the platter surface, removing the magnetic coating that holds your data.

Whether a drive like this recovers depends almost entirely on platter condition, and platter condition depends almost entirely on how many times it was powered on after the noise started. Heads that failed cleanly can be replaced in a cleanroom. Heads that scraped have destroyed data that no lab recovers.

Both sound identical from outside the drive. The only variable you control is how many more times you try it.

The drive works fine. What broke is the organisation of the data — files deleted, a format run by accident, a volume that now shows as RAW, or Windows insisting the disk needs to be initialized before it can be used.

Deletion removes the pointer, not the file. A format resets the index without wiping the content. In both cases the data is usually sitting there intact, waiting for something to point at it again — and it stays that way right up until something writes over it.

This is the most favourable category there is, and it is also the one most often ruined afterward. The damage is rarely the original mistake. It is the repair attempt.

The drive still mounts but File Explorer hangs when you open it, copies stall partway, or you are seeing CRC errors and I/O device errors.

These are all the same underlying condition: the drive is failing to read parts of its own surface. When a drive hits a sector it cannot read it retries internally, often for several seconds per sector, which is why the whole machine feels like it is wading through mud.

The instinct is to keep browsing to see how bad it is, or to run a repair scan. Both make it worse — every retry is more wear on hardware that is already failing, and a full-surface scan on a degrading drive is hours of maximum stress at the worst possible moment.

The right move is a careful imaging pass that reads the healthy majority first at speed and returns for the difficult areas afterward.

A drive that was dropped while running is a different problem than one dropped while switched off. Running means the heads were flying nanometers above the platters when the impact came.

Water is more survivable than people expect, with one condition: do not dry it out and do not power it on. As water evaporates it leaves mineral residue bonded to the platter surface, and removing that deposit removes the magnetic layer under it. Seal it in a bag, keep it damp, and get it looked at quickly — this is the one category where days genuinely matter, because corrosion does not stop.

Either way, the single worst thing available to you is plugging it in to see whether it still works.