Fixing a corrupted hard drive

That depends on the source of the damage. If the damage is physical, and is to the drive itself, you may be up excrement creek without a propulsive device.

The first thing that I would try - well, in my case I would go to my backups. Do you have backups?

The second thing is to see if the damage is to the drive or the external electronics, hoping that it's the latter. If you are handy with computer hardware, remove the drive from the external casing and attach it directly to the motherboard of your desktop machine or, if you don't have one, a friend's desktop machine. If it works, breathe a sigh of relief and throw out the case that you removed it from.

If it still doesn't work, does it make awful noises? If it makes bad noises, you are probably out of luck without expensive professional help - or even with it. Although some people would put it in a sealed plastic bag and freeze it; I don't subscribe to that notion.

If it isn't making noises, and can be seen in the Device Manager, you could try recovery software. The simplest level is something like EASEUS Partition Recovery. The most complex level would be software that reads the drive sector by sector and tries to reconstruct files; a successful effort can take days.

So start at the beginning and let us know what you see along the way. All of us would be happy to help at any point along my list above; no need to work through to the end before posting again. Good luck.