I have a 4tb WD passport that has seemingly died and I need to get some files off it, in particular my excel file that has all my passwords.

When I plug in the drive, I cant open file explorer unless it was opened before I plugged it in. If it was opened before it will show up in file explorer but I cant open it and it crashes file explorer.

Trying to open excel has similar results.

I tried using minitool, but it also wont load unless I open it before plugging the drive in, and when I do plug it in, it gets stuck loading into the software so I cant even try to recover my files. Once I unplug it, all the actions I tried doing resume or unfreeze, resulting in a bunch of errors and me being able to use my pc again. It will even prevent my pc from turning off when i go to reset it, just giving an infinite spinning wheel until i unplug it. It does show up in device manager when it gets plugged in, but it says there are no driver updates available.

I havent tried another cable since its an old model and uses a type of cable I dont have a spare of.

How do I get my stuff back?

Give TestDisk a try, it might recover some files. Personally I used it and it's give 70% recovery rate.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

>>1534123
Thanks anon I will give it a try