You can use this freeware to read contents of linux filesystems on windows: https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/
But from the lock up I suspect it has a hardware failure. Check out its state with a SMART reader: gsmartcontrol or hdsentinel
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Yeah try opening with Linux live image. Linux mint or Ubuntu should work. Also sounds crazy but rotate the drive around slowly in your hand while it's plugged in and you're browsing. If the files show up, stop rotating it and quickly copy you files to a safe place.
Are you using a linux box to look at it? That's the first thing I'd try. Maybe just get a live-flash version to run temporarily if you don't have a dedicated one.
Is that sort of like setting up a virtual machine? All I have at the moment is my work laptop which is a Windows pc. If it is I can Google it and figure it out from there but that seems like a good idea.
The data was definitely there a couple of months ago when I first looked at it and now my uncle who went on a hike with me years ago to the summit of Mount Rose wants the video because while we were there the migration of the monarchs flew through and it was super amazing and now I can't get the damn video!
Yeah, basically you get (say, Ubuntu) and write it to a flash drive, then you boot off of the flash drive and use it as a linux box for the time it's up. When you power down, remove the flash dirve, and reboot, it's a Windows box again.
Not sure if your work has safeguards against that - it would be standard practice but some places still allow it.
You could try going old school and seeing if you can see the files with command prompt, first in Windows, then by rebooting to prompt if that fails.
You can then probably move files with the commands.
I tried running chkdsk in the command prompt but it just idles until I give up
I hope it's not dead but I fear it might be.
You say its a work PC - are you an administrator on this machine? Enterprise machines have often (for over a decade) locked the USB port so corporate data can't be copied off via USB.
I've seen USB drives show up weirdly on such machines.
What do you mean by "like an Android file system"?
Was this drive ever encrypted? That'll make it show up weird too.
The only other thing I can think of is there's something odd with that adapter.
No my job just lets me by laptops on the company card there's nothing weird about it it's basically my computer but the company paid for it.
When I plug it in file explorer shows to disk images one of which one opened basically shows what you would see if you plugged in your Android phone to a computer and the other one is called local disk and has all the info on it but freezes the computer when I try to click it.
I know for sure the drive was never encrypted it's from 2013 and short of taking it out of my tower PC even back then and plugging it in a couple of months ago I haven't done anything with it. It worked fine the first time I plugged it in.
I still don't know what you mean by "What you see when you plug in an Android phone" (I've plugged in a lot of Android phones, and they don't all show up the same way).
I'd take a look at Disk Manager - that will give you some insight.
I suspect the drive has issues. Try a drive recovery tool like Stellar NTFS - but only examine the drive. It should report what partitions it sees and if there's any recoverable data on it.
If you decide to try to recover the data, make sure you save to the drive on your PC. Also that's something that will take hours to days so do it in small batches and keep the drive cool while it's running.