Samsung external hard drive not showing anywhere: disk utility in mac book pro or PC

[fanny]

Hi there,
I'm totally desperate after having googled for a week to no avail. My external hard drive suddenly stopped showing up on my mac book pro.

I have checked in disk utility and it's not showing up there either. The cable doesn't seem faulty as the blue power light appears as soon as I connect it to my laptop.
I'm now trying to see if anything can be done from my partner's PC but the hard drive doesn't show on the disk management.

Which steps should I take in order to try and restore/format it before I splurge on a new one. Rage buy

Thank you so much in advance. And PS. I have read this thread https://www.techspot.com/community/...rive-not-showing-up-on-my-macbook-pro.172059/ but this person's hard drive did show up on disk utility so it's somewhat different, although I hope the ending will be just as happy!

 

[SNGX1275]

If it isn't showing up on OS X or Windows Disk Management (the contents of the drive won't show up in Windows unless the drive was exFAT formatted or FAT32 (extremely unlikely for a external HD in 2015)) that is a bad sign.

If the drive wasn't making any odd noises before this happened, there is a decent shot that just the enclosure has died. What you can do is open the enclosure and remove the drive itself and if your partners PC is a tower you can connect it internally there just to see if it shows up in Disk Management (again the contents won't be readable by Windows, but you can see if it works). If it shows up, then it is worth investing (I think its worth investing anyway) in an external dock.

If its one of the small notebook sized hard drives you could also just buy a basic external enclosure and put the drive in there. They make pretty slick tool-less ones for around $15 that are USB 3.

 

[fanny]

Perfect I'll try that. Thank you very much for your answer. It's much appreciated.