gparted not finding external hard drive

[jonass]

So I have an external hard drive I made from and old broken laptop. It worked when I put it together a few months ago, however today I plugged it in and mint never found it, so I opened gparted and it also never found it. I can feel that the drive is on and running when plugged in. One other thing, if I plug it into the front port of my comp, which sometimes seems to revert to usb 1 rather than the 2.0 they should be, it starts up but makes a clicking sound as it is spinning. I read that can be an issue of not getting enough power. If I plug it into the back port it does not do this. Still whichever port I try it still doesn't get found. How can I tell if this drive is broken for sure?

[Orbmiser]

Clicking sound is not good and an indicator that drive maybe going bad.
Would boot up to another windows machine to verify indeed it's a problem.

And yes some older desktops have underpowered front usb ports and can be resolve usb device issues plugging into back ports.

One trick I use to use when I did Hardrive data recovery for customers on a failing drive is to put in freezer for an hour.
Pull out and hooked up to computer and then had anywhere from 15-45 mins to recover data before the drive warmed up and started to fail again. Not 100% but if works then fails will verify bad drive. Just google freezing hardrive to see the successful results from others that have used the technique.
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[srq2625]

Clicking sound .... I've heard that as well.

I have a old WD Passport drive that used to work on my desktop. In hind-sight, I realize it stopped being recognized when I upgraded the MBO. From that time on - worked only on occassion. So, I bought a new external HDD.

In the last couple of days, I read somewhere that this sort of thing can be caused by not enough power on the USB port, thus not enough to properly drive the HDD.

So, I pulled out an old USB 2.0 powered hub, plugged that into the same port on my MBO, plugged the WD into the hub and ..... magic! It works again!

I have to wonder if the power on the MBO ports is, maybe by design, just enough for things like thumb drives, but not enough for "real" drives?