Hi all, I was wondering if anyone can help since I run out of ideas..I have and external 250GB hard drive - not new but it was functional. We had it attached to the desktop via USB and it was recognized so I was able to format it. The main purpose was to move some of the data from the computer's hard drive because it was reaching capacity. While copying one of the large folders the whole system stopped responding so after a couple of hours I had to shut it down. After it came back up the external hard drive is not recognized ANYWHERE - it's not detected in BIOS, not in Explorer, not in device manager or Disk Management. I run into similar issues before, and was able to repair bad sectors that were damaged during improper shutdown while the disk was written to by running the diagnostic tools (western digital, Hitachi, or Seagate) and format the drives there... This time the hard drive is not recognized at all and run out of ideas on how to get it fixed.... I know this is not exactly new and the capacity is not that large, but the thing is - we already moved some data over before it crashed and i'd like to have it back.. Any suggestions? Thank you!

You made two mistakes. First one is trusting a drive you had to repair sectors on. The second is using Cut and Paste instead of Copy and Paste. It is possible the enclosure or cabling is faulty so if possible remove the drive from the enclosure and connect directly to an internal drive controller. You could also try booting to the DOS version of the disk tools for that brand and model drive and see if the drive will show up that way.