My spare external drive recently "died" and only it's System Reserved (100mb) partition shows up when I attach it to my PC. Eventually after a few minutes the main partition gets assigned a letter but neither partition is actually accessible and actually causes Windows to run super slow. I can't seem to run any kinds of scans on the drive and it's always behaving as though it's just being read but never quite finishes.

Thoughts?

can you post s.m.a.r.t log here ?

drive has probably bad sectors or Firmware problem.

since drive is in detection, try to clone (sector-to-sector) it another drive by using ddrescue.

good luck.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Nothing accesses the drive so I can't do smart or clone.

with usb connection you wont be able to do that.
try to connect hard drive to direct SATA port.

am sure with given description you can atleast try to clone it with ddresuce in Linux, but if you are not confident for doing so, send it to DR company.

believe it or not, drive is about to die but still have chance to clone it before it completely fail, what is more your drive is a DM series (complicated for recovery once completely failed)

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Data Recovery Pakistan

If the drive is about to die then so be it. Was hoping it was savable and reusable.