Hard Drive Giving me Errors

[The invoker]

Long story short, I have this 3 TB hard drive. I use it for second-hand storage meaning that i store what I need on it, put it away until I need it again. Now, Everything was working perfectly fine as of a week ago and now I can't do ANYTHING to the drive. It gives me the "semaphore timeout period has expired" whenever I try to format it. I've tried going into the elevated cmd and doing the CHKDSK command on the drive letter (when it's recognized) and whenever I put in the drive letter, it says that it's an invalid parameter. I've also tried going into diskpart and doing a clean, create partition primary deal, but it always gets stuck at the clean and it gives me the semaphore error. I just got it a year ago and there hasn't been anything physically damaged, and I've always stored it in the packaging that it comes in. I have no clue what the hell is wrong with it. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[rhysiam]

HDDs die... unfortunately. They're probably the least reliable PC component, at least that's true in my experience.

Download a program like HD Tune, or anything that can read SMART data. Go to "Health" (for HD Tune - other programs will call it something different) and look at the drive status. See if there are any errors there. It's not always straightforward, so post a screen shot here if you're not sure.

There are other things you can try. It's possible that the cable or SATA port could be your issue. So you can (for example), temporarily disconnect your optical drive and use that power and data cable to test the HDD again. But that's a longshot. If the problems persist, as I expect they will, it's a pretty good sign that your disk is dead.

Is it under warranty? If so, some errors on the SMART data should be enough to claim a replacement (check the procedures for the specific drive manufacturer). Otherwise, probably time to buy a new drive I'm afraid.