I would add, or ask. Does your hard drive make any unusual noises when booting or seeking? If not, you may just have a bad MBR, which is much easier to fix. If you don’t quite have the technical skills, you could take it to a Geek Squad or the like and it would only be 100-200.
But, if the HD has had a catastrophic physical failure, it’s going to get expensive.
Yes, that’s exactly what it was doing, so my husband removed it and replaced it with a new hard drive (internal)...a few years ago something similar happened to my computer, and there was a little hole-in-the-wall repair shop down the street. They had me bring a new external hard drive and they transferred all the documents, pictures, videos, etc. from the broken one to the new hard drive. Went to see if they could fix this current drive the same way, but they seem to have moved or gone out of business. :-( I’m so not a happy camper about this! :-(
I tried to transfer the info using that MS Files Transfer Wizard thing, but apparently I didn’t save the files correctly to my external hard drive because I can’t open any of the files now. (a usmt2 folder full of 56GB of .dat files)