Badly scrambled, is my guess.
An error during shutdown, or storage, or reboot, may have damaged the disk’s MBR or Boot Sector or GUID table (depending on how the disk was set up). If there were files on the disk, they’re still there, but the OS can’t see or access them.
Hard drives in long-term, unused storage may suffer damage if knocked, dropped, placed beneath heavy objects, or subject to temperature extremes or strong external magnetic fields. Long-unused drives may suffer stiction, sluggish or restricted movement of mechanical parts, or other physical issues, as well.
If you need the files on the old drive, don’t do anything else with it — don’t keep trying to write files to it. Instead, use a partition recovery tool to see if you can repair the damage, and restore access to the missing files.
If you don’t need the old files on the drive, just go ahead and repartition/reformat it to return it to service.
But note: The drive already has suffered one serious failure, so don’t trust it with anything essential or irreplaceable! Entropy is a one-way street, and once a mechanical drive starts to go bad, it never, ever truly gets better; even if you can reformat it and return it to service.
If a drive has suffered a serious failure once, it will surely fail again, and probably sooner rather than later. Don’t trust it with vital files!
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