Issues with my external harddrive

[Greatbacon]

So a couple of days ago my windows 7 install stopped recognizing my external harddrive.

It powers on, LED on the front still blinking, and I can hear the disc drive spinning and sometimes it'll pop up as an E:/ drive under my hard disk drives but it never displays the name or files.

I also tried hooking it up to my Linux netbook and while the netbook recognized that an external harddrive was plugged in, it would not provide the name or any access to the files.

I'm thinking it might be an issue with the usb cable, does that sound feasible or am I just in denial that I'm about to loose my external HD again?  Any other possible explanations?

[StolenToast]

So a couple of days ago my windows 7 install stopped recognizing my external harddrive.

It powers on, LED on the front still blinking, and I can hear the disc drive spinning and sometimes it'll pop up as an E:/ drive under my hard disk drives but it never displays the name or files.

I also tried hooking it up to my Linux netbook and while the netbook recognized that an external harddrive was plugged in, it would not provide the name or any access to the files.

I'm thinking it might be an issue with the usb cable, does that sound feasible or am I just in denial that I'm about to loose my external HD again?  Any other possible explanations?

This EXACT thing happened to me not 3 days ago.  I fixed it by running a couple chkdsks on the drive.  This can be done most easily by right clicking on the drive, >properties>tools>error checking.  I had to run it twice before my drive was back to normal.

[Greatbacon]

Okay, so now my OS is recognizing the HD, but it is taking forever for it to load the file structures (somewhere in the area of 200 kB/s)

I'm running a check disk right now but my guess is that the ol' girl is about to shit the bed soon.  I hope I can get a backup made before it does.  Good thing cyber monday is coming up.

[Eschatos]

Check SMART status in linux, if it says nothing wrong backup and format the drive.

[StolenToast]

Okay, so now my OS is recognizing the HD, but it is taking forever for it to load the file structures (somewhere in the area of 200 kB/s)

I'm running a check disk right now but my guess is that the ol' girl is about to shit the bed soon.  I hope I can get a backup made before it does.  Good thing cyber monday is coming up.

Just keep chkdsking!  Don't give up!  It also took at least one restart.  "Taking forever to load the file structure" is what happened to my drive after the first "unsuccessful" check, so there still may be hope.  It's kind of scary how similar your issue is to mine, I don't suppose it's a 1TB Fantom Greendrive?

[FlyingMongoose]

It could be something as simple as a bad cable...

[Didzo]

Could be a bad disk controller. If all else fails, crack open the enclosure, remove the drive, and plug it directly into your mobo as if it were an internal drive.

[HeK]

Well, I missed this thread.

What type of USB drive is it? WD?

The problem with modern USB drives is that the controller is built especially for USB applications, it does not understand normal ATA instructions. Older USB drives were simply a IDE/SATA drives with a USB adapter card.
Check your windows event viewer and see if the manufacturer has a diag tool. Changes are that the drive is dying.

Slow read access generally points to subsequent read retries, pointing to damaged or dirty heads. You will want to recover as much data as possible and either lowlevel format (if possible) or simply toss the drive.
Fun trick with recovery is to wrap the drive in a zip lock and toss into a freezer. I've even done this with a long USB cable and done the recovery while the drive is still in the freezer. This causes the components to shrink, expanding tolerances and increase the air density inside, which allows the heads to float further off the surface of the disk.

[Greatbacon]

Okay, so I've done some more work with the drive.  I cracked the enclosure and plugged it in directly to the mobo but nothing recognized that it existed (I was using a SATA interface cable though and I think this might be ATA, not exactly sure if that would cause issues)

At this point I'm just gonna consider it more or less dead and try and recover as much data as I can off it.  Thanks for the freezer tip HeK, I'll try that out and see if that'll help speed things along.