CRC problem, external hard drive

[98longr]

hi i have a buffalo 2.0TB hard drive. about a week ago it told me that i had to format the drive to access it. naturally i tried everything but formatting since i didnt want to lose everything on the drive. but today i had no choice left and tried to format it...guess what...it didnt format! its telling me i have a CRC problem. i looked on here for help with CRC problems and external hard drives but havent found a solution yet. i have triedexchanging the usb cables. but apart from spending a small fortune on the drive i cant seem to find an answer. if there isnt one i might just get rid of it and buy a new one!
any help would be amazing. thanks.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Sure looks a hardware error!

CRC errors occur when a check value for data doesn't match the data. If data is lost, or changed in a sector on your HDD, it won't match the calculated value initially. Sort of like if a dollar dropped out of a cash register, the amount in the register wouldn't match the totaled register paper receipt for the day.

First, run chkdsk /r against the external drive, which may fix or replace bad sectors with known good ones. There could be some data loss in the process. If that's not successful, consider Steve Gibson's Spin Rite program (~$90) which is one of the most thorough ways of correcting bad sectors and info in the bad sectors. Depends on how important the data is, since you could purchase a new HDD for about the same amount.

Could also try a data recovery program, like the Easeus Data Recovery Wizard (free version), which looks for specific file types and moves them to a separate HDD. May get most but probably not all data back.
Here is the link to Easeus if you wanted to try that. http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

There is the free edition, and a more comprehensive professional edition depending on how much data you have to recover.