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external hard drive shows up as 'local disk (:D)' and won't let me access it

Anonymous
2023-05-27T12:04:48+00:00

So, this has been going for roughly 3 days now, but for some reason, my external hard drive shows up as 'local disk (:D)' and won't let me access it. Whenever I actually try clicking on the drive on file explorer, the error code is never consistent: sometimes it'll tell me 'Parameter is incorrect', other times it'll say 'drive is unreadable and/or corrupted' (or something like that, I haven't gotten the error message for 2 days now), other times file explorer will just straight up freeze and other times it'll ask me to format drive to use it. Lately I've been getting the 'parameter is incorrect' message every time I try open the drive, so that's probably the main issue. I've tried every method in the book to solve this. I've tried chkdsk, sfc scannow, DISM, reinstalling the drive, updating the driver and practically any other solution you can think about. Heck I've even tried FORMATTING THE DRIVE but SOMEHOW, and I mean S O M E H O W, that didn't work. I've also noticed that file explorer has been running as well as a drunk snail as of late, as it takes a century for things to load and it also just stops responding at random, but that's probably not correlated to my problem. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Or am I just fighting a losing battle?

(I would show a screenshot, but it doesn't work)

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-05-27T13:01:25+00:00

    I've only had the hard drive for about a year now. I remember about a week ago, the hard drive would randomly disconnect at the slightest movement. That's likely a contributing factor. Here's the screenshot.

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  2. DaveM121 879.6K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-05-27T12:39:26+00:00

    Hi SomeGuy,

    I am Dave, I will help you with this.

    1

    It is possible that drive has failed, was it dropped or is it very old?

    2

    Right click your Start Button and open Disk Management from the resulting menu.

    Expand the bottom pane so that drive is visible in that pane

    Please provide a screenshot of that Disk Management window

    Or does Disk Management become buggy with that drive is connected and fail to load?

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  3. DaveM121 879.6K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-05-28T05:58:09+00:00

    1

    Any device, like a PC, laptop, TV... etc to see f you can access that drive.

    2

    Please don't guess at the drive number in case you wipe the wrong drive, if you are unsure, please provide a screenshot of the result of that list disk command.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-05-28T00:55:53+00:00
    1. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you, but no, I don't think I have a device that can access the data on that drive, what sort of devices do you mean?
    2. I'm assuming disk 1 would be the disk I'm trying to clean, right? (just thought I'd double-check)

    I don't really have anything of value on the drive, considering I literally just formatted it yesterday (not that there was anything important on the drive in the first place). I thought I'd get back to you now, lest command prompt takes 4 hours to finish (yes that's happened before).

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  5. DaveM121 879.6K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-05-27T13:07:49+00:00

    1

    Thank you for the screenshot, the partition on that drive is now RAW, do you have another device you can connect that drive to and check if you can access the data on that drive?

    If that drive disconnected while Windows was writing to that drive, that may have corrupted all data on that drive.

    2

    If all else fails, you can try this process, but please note, this will delete all data on the drive.

    Open Command Prompt by right clicking its icon and select 'Run as Administrator'

    Run this command and hit Enter:

    diskpart

    Run this command and hit Enter:

    list disk

    (Make note of the disk number you want to convert and enter it into the next command - replace X)

    Run this command and hit Enter:

    select disk X

    Run this command and hit Enter:

    clean

    Then check in Disk Management to see if that drive is now unallocated space and if you can right click that and choose 'New - Simple volume' and accept the defaults.

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