Following the usual advice to check Disk Management, but my external drive does not even appear there, which seems to be a worse sign.
What does absence from Disk Management specifically mean and what is left to try?
External hard drive not showing in the Disk Management utility
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Rachel Kim August 12, 2019
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Absence from Disk Management is indeed more serious than showing without a letter, because it means Windows is not recognizing the drive at the disk level at all, narrowing the causes to a shorter, deeper list:
The power question first, especially for larger drives: an external drive not getting enough power may spin up partially but not enumerate, so a drive with a separate power adapter needs it connected and working and a bus powered drive on a weak or hub shared port may starve. Try the drive with its own power source if it has one, and a direct rear port rather than a hub, since insufficient power is a leading cause of complete non recognition, the drive lacking the juice to present itself.
The cable and the different computer test, harder this time: a different high quality cable, since USB cables fail in ways that pass power but not data and critically a different computer, because a drive absent from Disk Management on one machine but appearing on another localizes the fault to the first machine's ports or drivers, while absence on every machine points hard at the drive or its enclosure.
Device Manager, the next layer in: even absent from Disk Management, the drive may appear in Device Manager, possibly with an error, under Disk drives, USB controllers or as an Unknown Device. Its presence there with a warning is a driver or enclosure communication problem, addressed by driver reinstall, while total absence from Device Manager too confirms Windows gets no signal from the device at all.
The enclosure versus drive distinction, the useful insight for external drives: an external drive is a bare drive inside a USB enclosure, and the enclosure's controller board fails more often than the drive itself, so a drive dead in its enclosure may live perfectly when the bare drive is removed and connected directly via SATA or a different enclosure or dock. This is the recovery move for a drive absent everywhere, since the data is usually fine and only the enclosure electronics died, worth trying before concluding the drive is gone or paying for recovery.
The enclosure was the culprit, exactly your useful insight. Removed the bare drive, put it in a cheap dock and it appeared immediately with all my data intact, the enclosure board had simply died. I was about to pay for data recovery on a perfectly healthy drive. That distinction saved real money.