External HDD recognized but freezes Windows Explorer

Reckoning

Posts: 96   +0
I have a 2 TB WD external HDD. I noticed awhile ago that I would get errors when trying to copy from or to it. Not too long after I brought the drive to a laptop and was having permission issues so I tried to set permissions and it got errors about the owner of the drive. I didn't think much of it at the time and just put the drive aside for about a month. Now when I plug it back in to its home machine, it takes a good 5 minutes to be recognized in "This PC" but if I try to open the drive it completely freezes Windows Explorer. This is on a Windows 10 machine.

Yesterday I brought it to a Windows 7 machine to see if it was an issue with my main machine or if the issue followed the hard drive. It certainly followed the hard drive. Again it would take about 5 minutes to me recognized once plugged in and when you go to Computer you would see the progress bar at the top going green as if it were discovering the drive but it never finishes and once you touch the drive (either via Windows explorer or Device Manager, it locks up Windows explorer.)

I then took it out of it's enclosure and tried to connect it via SATA to my main machine (Windows 10) and the machine would not even boot. As soon as I disconnect the drive, the machine boots right up.

chkdsk just hangs as does everything else when you try to talk with this drive. I left chkdsk overnight and it just sat, nothing to indicate it ever started.

This drive has tons of valuable data and I don't want to reformat if at all possible. Is there any way or any software you guys know of that can talk to this drive so I can get my data?
 
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Sounds like a corrupted partition table that needs to be repaired
 
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