Welcome to the TH Community, @ZOS___!
Can you please provide more details about the troubleshooting you have done on your external HDD so far?
If the drive is making clicking noises, then you should definitely backup all your important files from it somewhere else as soon as you can access them! I'd also advise you to go to
Disk management in Windows and check how your external is recognized there. Posting some screenshots would be really helpful to us. It would also be a good idea to run your
HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic utility to check up on the health and SMART status of the drive. I'd also recommend checking how the HDD would get detected in another system and also try using a different USB cable and a different port on your PC/laptop.
Keep me posted with the details & troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD