I am using an almost brand new Dell laptop running Windows 10 1909 with all updates through May, 2020 applied. I use an external USB 3.0 hard drive to store my personal data. Yesterday the laptop locked up and I received an error message that the Recycle Bin for the external drive was corrupt. I found several examples of the same procedure for correcting the problem. When I applied it (it involved the rd command), I got an error message saying the recycle bin could not be repaired that way because it was not empty. I exited that procedure and rebooted the laptop. When I rebooted, I was no longer able to access the external drive. Windows was no longer able to see the drive though Device Manager still sees its name. I uninstalled the drive in Device Manager and rebooted and reconnected it but it was still not available as a drive. I did briefly see the drive shown as available in Windows Explorer but with the indication that it was not available. Subsequent reboots do not show the drive at all.
Is there any way to get this external drive working again. Some web searches have not turned up anything.
I do have almost all the data available in Drive History backups stored on a NAS but created on another computer with a different computer name but I am not sure how I would get those backups onto this laptop without having to deal with all the different file versions and timestamps. I really want to get the external drive working again. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
BTW, if this topic has come up before, a pointer to that prior thread should be sufficient.
Thanks, everyone.
