One of our customers brought a Western Digital portable external hard drive to us since their PC wasn’t recognising it.
Typically, with symptoms like this, the most likely cause is the that USB interface is broken or not working, rather than a fault with the drive itself. (This is the most common cause of failure with external USB hard drives). Fixing this used to be a quite straightforward, because most external hard drives were really just internal SATA ones (either 2.5″ or 3.5″) inside an enclosure- essentially just a case with a SATA-to-USB interface board. You could open the case, unplug the internal SATA drive from the faulty USB interface and put it in a new enclosure which can be bought for under £10.
