Hello,
My 2TB Western Digital external hard drive seems to be dying after roughly five years of service. I bought it back in 2011 or 2012 as both a backup for my main PC and to play movies on my TV - but a couple of weeks ago, about one hour into a movie I was watching - it suddenly froze and crashed. I did not kick it or anything (although it had a handful of short, soft falls over the years - none recently). Trying to plug it into my laptop results in different things happening:
1. Laptop recognizes it, but then hangs when trying to access it (explorer.exe crashes)
2. Laptop recognizes it, allows me to actually browse files & folders for a short time (no more than 1 minute) before eventually hanging. (so I at least know that all my data is intact)
3. Laptop does not recognize/read it at all
4. I get an I/O storage error when trying to access it (this has only happened once)
The external hard drive has about 500GB of data on it, and of that I'd say about 200GB are important to me. I don't have a backup, since it was my backup. I have stuff on there that I exchange with my main PC or other PC's when needed, also to free up space on said PC's.
What the external hard drive does, well - when it begins to hang, I put my ear close to it and I can hear it repeatedly spinning up, then a tiny *click* or *tap* noise, then spin down, then spin up, click, spin down, etc. After about half a dozen times, it spins down and just stops (but stays powered on).
Some searching around the web has led me to believe that it could be bad sectors, head crash, or even the SATA bridge card. I might try the freezer method later on, but of course I'll need something to copy my most important stuff onto first. And if it matters, I do have a SATA cable (I used it in the past to recover data off hard drives from dead laptops).
What should I do? I need to recover at least some of that data. I don't need "you're screwed get over it" responses; recommendations would be more helpful. I'm not the most computer-savvy person, so don't hesitate to explain something highly technical that you think I may not know about.
My 2TB Western Digital external hard drive seems to be dying after roughly five years of service. I bought it back in 2011 or 2012 as both a backup for my main PC and to play movies on my TV - but a couple of weeks ago, about one hour into a movie I was watching - it suddenly froze and crashed. I did not kick it or anything (although it had a handful of short, soft falls over the years - none recently). Trying to plug it into my laptop results in different things happening:
1. Laptop recognizes it, but then hangs when trying to access it (explorer.exe crashes)
2. Laptop recognizes it, allows me to actually browse files & folders for a short time (no more than 1 minute) before eventually hanging. (so I at least know that all my data is intact)
3. Laptop does not recognize/read it at all
4. I get an I/O storage error when trying to access it (this has only happened once)
The external hard drive has about 500GB of data on it, and of that I'd say about 200GB are important to me. I don't have a backup, since it was my backup. I have stuff on there that I exchange with my main PC or other PC's when needed, also to free up space on said PC's.
What the external hard drive does, well - when it begins to hang, I put my ear close to it and I can hear it repeatedly spinning up, then a tiny *click* or *tap* noise, then spin down, then spin up, click, spin down, etc. After about half a dozen times, it spins down and just stops (but stays powered on).
Some searching around the web has led me to believe that it could be bad sectors, head crash, or even the SATA bridge card. I might try the freezer method later on, but of course I'll need something to copy my most important stuff onto first. And if it matters, I do have a SATA cable (I used it in the past to recover data off hard drives from dead laptops).
What should I do? I need to recover at least some of that data. I don't need "you're screwed get over it" responses; recommendations would be more helpful. I'm not the most computer-savvy person, so don't hesitate to explain something highly technical that you think I may not know about.
I'd recommend you to start the troubleshooting by running the QUICK and EXTENDED tests from
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