External Hard Drive not detected in any location

sarah532

hello everyone,
I've had the Maxtor 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for 3 years now and I take great care of it. However today when I plugged it into my laptop, it made a clicking noise, like that of a clock, for 7 seconds then it stops making noise. The blue light is on for my HDD.
I went to 'disks' and it does display my HDD (just the model and serial number). I tried plugging and unplugging, even turned off and on my laptop. Everything is up-to date.
When I run sudo fdisk it's not detecting the HDD.

This hasn't happened to me before. What's wrong? How can I make it detectable? Thanks.

DataDrake

sarah532 That clicking noise is either the drive heads trying to read the same sector over and over and failing or the spindle motor trying to rev up and failing. I hate to say this, but any clicking like that from a HDD is usually a sign that it is failing or has already failed.