TheCruelator :
whenever i click on it, it freezes up even when on right click so I had to close the window or restart windows explorer from task manager. I know it can be fixed because some people are trying to buy it from me even if I told them its broken. thanks in advance!
How long have you waited after clicking on it before deciding that it's frozen?
When a HDD writes data, it writes what's called a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) with the data. The CRC is a number calculated based on the contents of the data. When the HDD reads the data back, it calculates the CRC from the data it's just read, and compares it to the stored CRC. If these do not match, then it knows it's encountered a read error, and tries to read the data again.
If it keeps encountering read errors, it keeps trying again. Usually for 1-5 minutes, before finally giving up and declaring the data is unreadable (the old "abort, retry, fail?" query from the DOS days). If you're not waiting this long, the drive may just have a bad sector in a crucial area, and could in theory be "repaired" by a simple surface scan. All HDDs have reserve sectors which can be mapped in for (used instead of) bad sectors. It's just a matter of giving the drive the opportunity to discover the problem and do the mapping.
I'd right-click on the drive since that would normally make a menu pop up. Then go eat lunch or something. See if the menu has popped up by the time you get back. If it has, the drive *might* be fixable by doing a surface scan for bad sectors. You may lose all your data and have to reformat, but it might still be usable. (This is assuming it's a random bad sector. If there's another problem like the heads are drifting out of alignment, then new bad sectors will continue to form. The drive would essentially be useless then.)
Plugging it into a TV won't cause any problems. But unplugging it sometimes does. I've seen it corrupt the partition table when you do something hasty like unplug it while the TV is reading off of it. I really wish they'd put write-protect switches on external HDDs so this couldn't happen. For some reason even though a device is only reading from the drive, unless it's unmounted properly before unplugging sometimes the data on it can be corrupted. A corrupt partition table could also cause the freezing problem you're encountering. I'd say a dead drive is most likely to cause the symptoms you're seeing, a bad cable after that, then a bad sector in a crucial area (like the partition table), and finally just a corrupt partition table.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram