Failed external hard drive mysteriously reappears using Finder

I will try to keep this short. I lost a drive a few months ago that had (3) partitions. One failed, the other 2 went a few weeks later at the same time. Each failed when I clicked on a file. They just 'disappeared', tried everything to get them back, short of a 'recovery'. I just figured the whole drive was now dead. None of the three would show or mount. They were just 'gone'.

Well, a few minutes ago, I was using Finder to search for an important folder that was 'lost', (I hoped I might get lucky and find it somewhere else on my Mac). So what happens? I search the file in Finder, and up pops the folder in the drive that would not mount, its on the desktop open and there is my folder (among everything else). At first I thought it was one of my other drives. I clicked on some of the files and saw them in a (column) finder window. Then I went to get the file size of the folder using 'get info', thinking I would save it elsewhere...and it all immediately disappeared again. I've tried and tried and TRIED to get this to work again, but it doesn't show up in finder now.

Dose anyone know what might be going on? I've never heard of this behavior before. It's not a cable issue. It's not a USB port issue. Apparently the data is still on the drive. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'd really like to get my data back but I have no idea of what to do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Specs: Seagate External Hard Drive

iMac 2013 | OS Catalina 10.15.7

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