external drive chkdsk stuck on "chkdsk verifying Usn journal"

[jjfight]

Hello,

Last week I began to have some issues with a Toshiba Canvio 1TB external hard drive. After some research, I decided to run a chkdsk from the command prompt. All was going well until I reached the "CHKDSK verifying Usn journal" step. This step has been running for about 24 hours with no end in sight. I know it's a larger drive and it may take awhile, but 24 hours seems like a long time. The LED on the drive is blinking and the drive is running, so I think it's doing something, but I am concerned that I may lose a lot of important files. Any thoughts on how long this may take?

Thanks for any information.

Jason

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, Jason!

Unfortunately, your issues sound pretty concerning. I'd strongly recommend you to backup your data as soon as you can access it. In the future, make sure you keep at least two copies of your files stored in different locations/storage drives. Having only one copy of those is not a backup solution and often leads to data loss.
I'd recommend you use the HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic tool or a third-party alternative, rather than CHKDSK as it could corrupt the data by remapping any bad sectors you might have on the external.
Before running the software utility you might want to try using a different USB cable and a different USB port on your computer. If you have access to another system, you could also plug the HDD there and see how it will get recognized.

Hope this helps you. Keep me posted.
SuperSoph_WD

 

[jjfight]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, Jason!

Unfortunately, your issues sound pretty concerning. I'd strongly recommend you to backup your data as soon as you can access it. In the future, make sure you keep at least two copies of your files stored in different locations/storage drives. Having only one copy of those is not a backup solution and often leads to data loss.
I'd recommend you use the HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic tool or a third-party alternative, rather than CHKDSK as it could corrupt the data by remapping any bad sectors you might have on the external.
Before running the software utility you might want to try using a different USB cable and a different USB port on your computer. If you have access to another system, you could also plug the HDD there and see how it will get recognized.

Hope this helps you. Keep me posted.
SuperSoph_WD

Thanks for your reply SuperSoph.

I have tried different USB ports and actually different computers as well.

My home computer won't read the drive at all - I thought maybe if I uninstalled the drivers and then reinstalled them, it may help the issue on that computer. Unfortunately, the drive isn't recognized and I am having trouble locating the proper drivers. There are some third party sites that say they have the drivers, but it makes me nervous downloading drivers from third party sites.

Right now I am using my work computer that still has the drivers on it and that is how I was able to run the chkdsk. I finally aborted the chkdsk manually this morning because I need the computer that it was running on and the problem isn't yet solved. I downloaded Seagate and that is running now. It actually has passed the short DST on Seagate and I'm now running the Short Generic test.

Update - it has also passed the Short Generic test. I won't be able to do anything else until later today, but I plan on using whatever tools necessary in Seagate to get this fixed. Thanks again.

I'll let you know how all of this goes. Thanks again for your help.

Jason