External Hard drive issue

[David82]

Morning all.

I have a bit of an issue that I hope someone can help with.

I have a 2tb external drive which I use to backup loads of data from my NAS. The NAS is quite old and has less than 2tb of storage so recently I have been moving older stuff off onto the USB drive, so there is no longer a backup... I bet you can guess where this is going.

So the 2TB drive was partitioned with 1.3TB for my backups and the rest of the space had some non important stuff on it, mostly empty.

Partition 1 : 1.3TB Almost full of backups of data.
Partition 2 :  700GB Mostly empty.

I needed a bit more space on the backup partition so last night I used disk manager to shrink partition2 with the plan being to expand partition1 into the empty space.
What actually happened is after 10 minutes my laptop locked up and crashed.

Now when I plug the drive in explorer locks up. Occasionally I get a glimmer of hope and the disk is listed in "My PC" but most of the time I get nothing.

What are my options?

DiskPart wont run with the drive connected.
Disk Manager runs but is more or less non-responsive.
Task Manager shows the drive is 100% utilised but with 0 reads or writes.

 

[David82]

For future reference if anyone else has a similar issue, I booted off a Linux mint disk that I had lying around and tried the drive in there - worked first time.

So Im in the process of pulling all of the data off the external drive now before I wipe the partitions and start again