Formatting external drive failed - system takes hours to read it now !

[Manoranjan86]

Here is the situation,
I had a 1 TB external drive which i tried to format from FAT32 to NTFS using cmd prompt. The drive already was half full. It went on for like 12 hours and was yet to be over. A sudden power blackout took out my Uninterrupted Power Supply unit, and hence an abrupt shut down of my PC.
Now when i check the drive using disk management tool, it says the drive is NTFS (even though the format was not complete), is healthy with no bad sectors and shows a drive letter for it.
However, reading/accessing it now takes forever, my system freezes sometimes, and sometimes the drive letter does not show up in my computer, Autoplay freezes my PC, cancelling the Autoplay takes forever, basically using the drive in any form has become a tedious affair. Is there anything i can do without losing my data ? Rather, what is wrong with the hard drive ?
The drive was meant to be my backup before i upgrade my desktop.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

Do some basics on your PC first to make sure your running a clean and up to date system because that can cause the same issues your experiencing as well as other reasons.

Did you install all Windows Updates? Including OPTIONAL except BING? Check them and repeat till ALL are installed.

Download and run Slim Drivers, install all the latest updates but you don't need to reboot until you do the last update

Download Malwarebytes do a full system scan (AV doesn't pick up alot of malware) - this resolved almost ALL other similiar posts to date as most had Malware the AV didn't pick up.

Remove whatever AV your using and go to www.filehippo.com and download AVIRA, AVG, Comodo or Panda and do a full system scan - this repeatedly has resolved alot of people issue relying on MS Essentials.
Repeat the AV/Malware scans till the system comes up clean.

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Once your system AT THE TIME OF THIS POST is confirmed with all the above completed THEN,
Download DBAN and make a DBAN CD. Unplug your other internal drives (to protect then from being erased) and use the DBAN on the external drive. If it takes more then a couple hours to wipe the drive, then the ext drive is failing and you need to buy a new one (they are cheap, 1TB ext I seen at Walmart for $49).

If DBAN comes up okay, when you replug in the internal drives then it should be auto want to format and assign a letter to it. Again if it takes as long as your saying on a CLEAN system the Ext Drive is failing