Help would be greatly appreciated! I have a 1tb Western Digital Elements External Hard Drive that is <1 year old, and up until two days ago, was working fine.
There was no physical damage it received. I had the drive plugged into my laptop, I attempted to open a folder on it after some time had passed: it froze, then closed out. I unplugged the drive and re-inserted it: my computer recognizes that something was plugged in, but I cannot access the files on the drive.
There is '''no ''clicking noise'''''. It lights up fine, and I can hear the disk spinning smoothly. It shows up under Device Manager under its proper name, but not in Disk Management. When I open disk management, I get a message that says “you must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it”. It does not work when plugged into different computers, nor when switching the cables.
I am a computer novice, but my sleuthing leads me to believe that the issue is with the SATA connections. Though this seems to be an easy fix, Western Digital unfortunately has the sata connections integrated into the rest of the board. A video had suggested buying another identical hard drive and replacing the controller board with the old one, but others have said that is a bad idea. Please help me.