External hard drive dead? Doesn't detect anymore. Bad sector?

[Namie]

I have an external hard drive and when I tried accessing a file on it, it just froze -so I figured I'd just turn it off and turn it back on. I think that was a bad idea, especially since the LED was still blinking red (busy). Afterwards, when I turned it back on, it wouldn't detect anymore! No matter what I do, I can't access the drive. It has the yellow exclamation point under "Mass Storage Device" in the device manager; if I try disabling that and enabling it, the drive does show up -- BUT it's still not accessible, AND it doesn't even show the drive capacity. Is the partition corrupt? What should I try fixing?

[shizzzon]

sounds like you may have corrupted it. Does this drive appear during the POST of your pc booting up? or in Device Manager still?

If it does, get GetDataBack for NTFS(i'm assuming it's NTFS, if not get it for FAT32) and this will recover data off of it to another drive ONLY. After you get as much stuff off of it, reformat the drive.

[CalvinLuck]

There is nothing written for the drive's capacity (in Disk properties > Volumes) and that is normal.

When there is a yellow exclamation point, it usually means there is an error with the driver.
I would suggest to do troubleshoot from there. Right-click the disk drive in Device Manager > choose Properties > Troubleshoot (in General tab), and follow the instructions.

Another way is to roll-back or Update driver to its previous driver. From Device Manager > Right Click on disk > Properties > Driver tab, choose Roll Back Driver.
If "Roll Back driver" doesn't work, then do "Update Driver"

Another way is to do checkdisk from DOS prompt (accessories > command prompt), in the case of disk sector error. Type in:
chkdsk d: /f (d: is the drive path, /f is to fix error found)

[Namie]

I tried bad sector check with PartitionMagic and also the regular windows checkdisk, but both of them failed to correct the problem.

I ended up reformatting the drive so the drive would at least detect normally. After that I tried a file recovery tool and it actually allowed me to retrieve some files! It took hours but I was surprised it actually showed files I've deleted before too.