Is my HDD dead?

[sentur]

Is my external HDD broken?

It's taken 124 hours to check bad blocks and it's only reporting 0.40% done. Seems like a long time. I can access most files on the drive even if it takes a while for that to happen.

Should I bin the drive or try and reformatting it?

 

[kanewolf]

What does the SMART data say?

 

[geofelt]

Your patience is remarkable

First of all, find the HDD maker's diagnostic utility.
WD is data lifeguard, Seagate is seatools.

If no joy, running that diagnostic, take the drive out of the external enclosure and connect it directly to a sata connector on your pc.
If nothing else, the diagnostic should run faster.

Since you can access files, it would be wise to copy off everything that you do not want to lose.

Ultimately, you may be able to reinitialize the drive to bypass faulty sectors and return the drive to full use.

 

[sentur]

Thanks for the suggestions.

It's WD 2TB external drive. Currently it's hooked up to a Linux server but formatted as ntfs. So I think I'll have to connect it up to my Windows machine for some more investigation with the 'Data Lifeguard tool'

I'll report back shortly.