External disc has become not Identified and HDM shows and I/O error for Disc on load

Hi all
I have an external hard drive I use for Backup and some important documents. We recently moved house and since setting up the external HDD is no longer identified. I have heard that I and get windows 10 to identify the drive and can then allocated it but when I do I will not be able to access the data. A work around I saw online(elsewhere) shows that once it is identified, making a backup of the disc prior to allocating may provide a recovery of the data.
I have Hard disc manager 15 suite installed for my backups( just configured a very basic backup) and am wanting to know if there is a way to identify the disc and allocate the partition WITHOUT loosing any of my data

Thanks
Carol