Cannot Access External Drive

Good day,
I have a Dell with 16Gb Ram running Windows 10. I have numerous Western Digital external hard drives, the one in question is almost the oldest, a 500GB drive that was the biggest available when I bought it.

A month ago I started have Windows start up problems, kept going into a loop where I landed on a page that gave me options for repairing Windows or the drive. At that time i did not know that the WD was the issue. should have unplugged all peripherals and restarted I know. However, after getting access to Windows back, I tried to access the drive and received "Windows cannot access this drive" error messages. Removed the drive intending to take it somewhere to try to recover the data. Have had no Windows issues since so am convincec that this was the issue.

On a whim I plugged it in yesterday and was able to access it! First thing I did was to copy all the data which happened without further issue. So now I have a drive that may or may not work. Once I get a new drive for backup installed and everything backed up I will run the WD utility to check this drive, but basically I have lost confidence in this drive for future use. I still am OK with WD drives in general, but what are the chances this drive is still good, will operate in the future. Can a drive that may have had "logical: issues be repaired with WD utilities. If there are bad sectors can they be repaired? Or should I just reformat to delete all personal data and toss it.

 

Check the drive with Windows.
Here are 4 options.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/40734-drive-error-checking-windows-10-a.html

FYI If you select Option Three, use the r switch - chkdsk C: /r

 

If This Doesn't work, it could also be that the hard drive is not active. I have ran into this problem myself.

Here are some instructions to do this:

Right-Click the "Start" menu button and Select "Disk Management" to display a listing of your hard drives and their status'.

Scroll through the list of your hard drives and right-click on your external hard drive.

Select "Mark Partition as Active."

HumbleServant1611

 

Thanks, I haven't put to disk that failed back on yet, but will and test it later.

Is there a preference in MG as to which back up software might be best, or better than most? I have
1) the WD backup software that came with the new hard drive
2) Norton Backup that is part of the 360 Security suite that my ISP provides
3) AOMEI and Comodo that Lifehacker rates 1 and 2, and
4) for WD users, a promo as part of the hew hard drive purchase for Acronis at $39.99 which is a cloud backup that says it will take my entire PC

 

I would start a new thread for this because you might not get responses to the infromation that you have presented in the above post.

Thanks
HumbleServant1611