[SOLVED] External hard drive dead ?

Nov 14, 2021
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I woke up today to one of my external HDD not working, it just shows 0 bytes being used and 0 bytes of free space and was asking me to format it as no file system was present.
I checked the event viewer and it shows it having a bad block so I ran chkdsk,that shows 2589 file records processed and 0 bad file records processed and it is still currently running stage 4. I know I should probably wait until stage 4 is complete but I was just curious is this HD done for or is there any hope of recovering anything ?
 
Solution
From your description, I think the HDD is not dead (mechanically and electronically it's fine), it probably has some bad sectors which is a common issue.
Back up data from it if you can get it to read files (hopefully).
Run chkdsk afterwards to on your external HDD
If it still yields that same error, might want to think replacing the external HDD with a new one.
Brand, model & How old is it?
 
Nov 14, 2021
4
0
10
Back up data from it if you can get it to read files (hopefully).
Run chkdsk afterwards to on your external HDD
If it still yields that same error, might want to think replacing the external HDD with a new one.
Brand, model & How old is it?

Western Digital Elements,WDBWLG0040HBK-NESN and its only about 7 months old.
 
Last edited:
Nov 14, 2021
4
0
10
Well after 11 hours stage 4 finally finished only for it to fail at stage 5 with this error
correcting errors in the volume bitmap
insufficient disk space to fix volume bitmap. chkdsk aborted