Disk defragment broke my HDD

[antonoskiv]

Greetings, Tom's Hardware community!

I seldom use forums online, but in this case, I think that I cannot avoid it. Since you already read the title, I will list some facts regarding my case:

• 
  The hard drive I am using is a Toshiba SATA 1TB 7200rpm drive via an encasement. This means that I connect it via USB to my laptop. The drive is almost new, it's been used for 2-3 months. Also, I decided to defrag it since it was working very slowly when I passed 500GB with my data.
  The defrag tool I used was Windows default defrag tool.
  The drive was had around 300GB of free space before the defrag. The tool said that the drive was 61% fragmented (which is extreme).
  The defrag process lasted ~12 hours. When it finished, I could no longer access the drive. It shows up in my computer, but disk space is nowhere to be found and the drive is inaccessible. Also, Windows Explorer starts crashing and bugging the moment I plug the drive in.

 

[asoroka]

I suspect that your drive was faulty already.

Your only option is to reformat (not quick format).

Can you format it from the command line? or does it really crash out all windows?
If you can't use windows, you may need to spin up a Linux live distribution and try formatting it there.

 

[Peter Martin]

Toshiba probably has test software you can use to see if it's faulty, then you can RMA it for a new one.

https://support.toshiba.com/harddrivesstorage

 

[antonoskiv]

The biggest problem is that I need to be able to recover my data from the drive. Not all of it, but around 25-30GB of the data is something I could never in my life recover again... I'll try your solutions and get back to you once done.

 

[asoroka]

stop.

If there is data that you need to recover, then send it off to a recovery lab.

If you format it you lose the data.

 

[Peter Martin]

If that data is so important to you then you had better take it to a data recovery place