External HD Problems

tairygreene

Honorable
Mar 6, 2013
23
0
10,510
I have a WD passport external hard drive that is acting up. If I click on certain folders on the drive or try to copy the files to my internal HD it crashes my computer.

I ran a disk check but it was taking forever. I left the disk check on all night but it only got up to 30%. I also tried doing the check in cmd but I got an "access denied" message even running as admin.

Is there any way to fix this or am I just screwed?
 

casper1973

Distinguished
Dec 30, 2012
942
0
19,360
If your disk check only got to 30% when running overnight - that is your problem! The disk is failing. An average CHKDSK /r should take around 2 hours at most.

The computer crashing when trying to access files/folders is also a common sign that the hard drive is failing.


If you need data from the drive and can't get to it, try some recovery software such as Recuva - http://www.piriform.com/recuva
I normally use this - http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/ - great software but it's not free