AKICIDW: Fixing a cranky external hard drive

[carbonel]

I have a 3Tb external hard drive that's about half full. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with it. When I tried to run the Windows error checking utility, it ran for quite a while, then hung.

I can see all the files, but a lot of them just return error messages or do nothing if I try to copy them. There's nothing critical if I can't recover the disk (it's mostly audiobooks and videos), but I don't have a backup.

Is there some better utility that you can recommend that will fix the drive and salvage what can be salvaged?

Comments

[graydon]

That sounds like it's past the "utility" stage; what one does at that point is pull a digital copy of the disk surface and try to recover from the copy, because running the hardware or a direct drive fix utility will likely make things worse.

Generally speaking, modern hard drives that show errors are out of spare sectors and are close to comprehensive failure. It sounds like that's about where this drive is, which is unfortunate.

[tournevis]

You say that there is nothing too crucial, but if you decide otherwise, I strongly suggest getting a copy of SpinRight from GRC. It's the best recovery tool I know. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Clone

[lsanderson]

The next step would be to clone the drive. I have hardware that can do that. Then you send file recovery software after the drive. Then, in my experience, you take a hammer to the bad drive and smash it to smithereens because you've just wasted a bunch of time. I have software for file recovery as well, but I am not in love with it.