Unable to access USB drive, an operation already pending

[Marco Fioretti]

Greetings,
I have an external USB drive that I use as extra backup, and has been working for months without problems. About one week ago, I attached it to my Ubuntu 19.10 box. at a certain point it was unmounted. I do not remember what happened because something else led me away from the computer in that moment, and thanks to this extremely chaotic quarantine period, I have had literally no time to go back to this issue until now.
I have attached the drive, the computer has beeped recognizing it, and in the file manager there is an entry with the drive label ("toschiba1"). However, when I click on that label I get the error message shown in the subject. There is a directory created, called /media/marco/toshiba1, but it is 700 and empty. The drive does nothing but some random click sound, once a minute or so.
Is there any hope it is not physically broken, and how to know it for sure, and then find/ fix the problem?
TIA,
Marco
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