External hard drive crash causes black screen

Desertrobot

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Dec 3, 2012
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So I am not sure whether to post this on the Windows 10 forum or on the hard drive forum, but I have an external hard drive right now that I use for storing my games (yes I know that is a terrible way to store games). It has more or less worked well for 2 years but recently it's been getting slow and unreliable.

Sometimes when I play games, the hard drive crashes, causing a black screen with a cursor to appear. Alt+tab does nothing, windows key does nothing and Alt+tab+delete also does nothing.

Other than physically restarting the computer, is there any way I can get back to desktop when this happens? Like I said, it's only a hard drive I have games on, Windows 10 and most of my other programs are on an SSD.