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Can you hear or feel the drive spinning with the power and USB plugged in?
Do you have a second computer (Linux or windows) to also try it in?
A brief search seems to indicate this drive is a minimum of 15 years old, which is an incredible age for a portable mechanical drive. I would honestly be preparing yourself to be dealing with this drove finally being cooked beyond repair. Sure hope you kept backups of what was on it!
There are two of them and I don't think my brother kept back ups, that is why he ask me to figure it out. I am the tech one to go to lol.
So, my first goto with an unresponsive external would be to remove the drive from its enclosure. Typically these are retail internal hard drive that are put in an enclosure with a small circuit board that converts SATA to a USB or firewire and sometimes those die.
If you "shuck" the drive and connect it directly to a computer internally via SATA you can bypass that board.
Next step is put the drive in your freezer for an hour or so then pull it out and connect it immediately. Sometimes this frees them up and makes them work for a short while, enough to copy some of the data off.
Drives not being recognized also sometimes happens if they corrupt one sector that's part of the file system tables and not the actual file system. The drive may be there but not have a file system for windows to read So there's some other tricks you can try using Linux tools to dump the exact bit for bit contents of the drive, and pass them thru an analyzer that will try to pick out what's likely of the file structure.
However, still given the drives age, I'll almost guarantee it's experienced a full mechanical failure and there might not be anything to recover...
Thank you for the valuable information. I have a sata kit for testing external drives but I need to get out of the case it came with