Frustrating Seagate external HDD issue.

[the a shen]

My external hard disk is, I suspect, failing, and I don't quite understand why. The external hdd was never dropped. Used for two years, light usage.

 

The disk contains around 300GB of lecture recordings of my professor babbling about accounting and business law.

 

As the new semester is starting I  want to clear up the spaces and prep for new recordings but when I delete (and transfer) files from the HDD to my desktop, half way through the process, it will freeze (random % range from 0-38%)

Freezing the transfer also freezes my windows explorer and subsequently freezes windows and the entire computer completely freezes. I checked that writing cache is not enabled, quick removal (default) is selected. Tried to scan and repair drive through this pc> drive properties but is forever stuck at *scanning and repairing* and never finishes.

 

Goes ahead to use CMD CHKDSK /f as advised from google search, screenshot attached. Then it goes ahead and replaces bad clusters, but it has been 3 hours since I punched in that command line and it is still replacing cluster of the first lecture recording on the disk, and that's just not going to cut it, there's 3 months of recordings on it. It would take probably till next year (2022) to fix all the bad clusters (should it even be work)

 

I'm not too good at computer and a noob in coding. Any help is appreciated.

 

Specifically, I want to know:

 

1. What solutions do I have if I wish to transfer my data out? Do I wait till next year for CMD to run? Are there any other software? If there are other software, do I just quit CMD?

2. I think the endgoal is to reformat the disk before rewriting anything back onto the disk. Am I correct?

3. How many bad sectors does CMD have to fix, will it be able to fix them all? (How to obtain such information?)

4. Just in general, what do I do now.

 

The drive is a Seagate Backup plus Portable 2TB External Hard Drive formatted as exFAT for cross platform use between macbook and PC

 

Read somewhere online people running out of space during this CMD replacing bad clusters but I have 1.7TB of free space, not anticipating such problems? (

Also from the looks of the CMD it seems like it is replacing every single cluster right now. A big chunk is bad cluster.

 

System: (tho i dont think relevant)

AMD 3600

RTX 2060 S

Aorus x470 gaming ultra mbo

EVGA 800W 80+G psu

 

Thanks a ton in advance.

 

EDIT: as if I jinxed, it, 3 seconds after I posted, CMD says not enough space to replace bad clusters. help.................

Edited January 7, 2021 by the a shen
new information update

[Kilrah]

You use something like ddrescue on linux to get your data back if it's important, and trash/replace the drive/get it warranty replaced if still covered.

[the a shen]

Thank you for the advice. I am currently trying my luck with Victoria. Just ran a S.M.A.R.T. Will finish this attempt before trying to rescue and dump drive. But at this point I'm already on Amazon.ca looking for drives. No clue what anything here means for now. If anything seems alarming would be greatly appreciated if you can let me know. Reallocated sector count looks alarming to me right now

[the a shen]

From my near zero knowledge it looks like 99.99999% of the hard disk is fine. Only the opening LBA (not sure what that means) is failing, and when it is being remapped,

 

Error: the request failed due to ta fatal device hardware error.

 

....................

 

any ideas?

 

wmic diskdrive get status in CMD returns: OK

[WkdPaul]

The hard drive has more bad sectors than spare ones, it's basically dying. LBA = Logical Block Addressing, or if you want, it's the address of the HDD sectors (kinda).

 

So, you have unreadable sectors on the disk. When that happen, there's not much to do other than to try to get as much of the data as possible before it collapse, so I would stop trying to diagnose it since it could make things worse.