My Hard Disk has become unreadable?

Kafesism

Prominent
Jun 10, 2017
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Hello. I have been following these forums for a long time but have just signed up now because I am having an issue with my hard disk.

My system and some other essential programs are in another hard disk that is working allright at the moment. However I had a WD10EZEX, which is a 1TB SATA hard disk. This was pretty recently bought. Yesterday when I started up my pc, Windows 10 opened up a screen which said something like "Scanning and repairing drive X". Drive "X" is what I called my 1TB drive. This "scan" took an hour or longer, after which my pc opened up succesfully. However I noticed that programs and files which were stored in X were being slow and there was definately something wrong with this drive. When I restarted my pc, Windows decided to do this scan again, which took another hour or longer. This upset me so I turned that feature of by modifying the registry and disabling the CHKDSK self-test on booting because it didn't seem to help me in anyway and it was unskippable.

After this, I right clicked on my X drive and opened properties. There I went to tools section and ran Error Checking. This took a whole night to be completed. I was awake when the scan ended upon which my drive became inaccessible, meaning I could no longer open the drive and see the files inside nor could I run error checking again. At this point I was going all around the web looking for information about what to do next. I came across this information and tried the option three, which is using the command chkdsk C: /f /offlinescanandfix in the command prompt. The progress on this is still ongoing with an ETA of 15 hours and counting.
UJo8oKNTRQi5FleJzf4dSQ.png


You can see in this image the command prompt just shows lots of "File record segment # is unreadable.".

While waiting for this I decided to download "SeaTools" by Seagate to run some tests on the drive aswell. I ran a "Short Generic" test which is progressing really slowly aswell and I will add the results to this thread when it is done.

So what should I be doing here? Should I be waiting for this chkdsk process to end before doing anything or should I be trying to recover data before its too late. I had a lot of good stuff on here including the source files for a video that I was working on aswell as rendered videos and video games. We are talking about 600 gb worth of files here. I won't die with their absence but I might loose a couple pieces of hair on my head.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, have a nice day!


Edit: It says "The parameter is incorrect." when I try to enter my drive.
I've also tried Minitool Partition Wizard and when I try to check file system it says "Access Denied as you have insufficient privileges." even though I started it in administrator mode.
 
Solution


At this point I'm just trying to recover my source files that were used in my video only. I've run some recovery programs but they couldn't find all the files. The video files were...
It looks like the drive is in the process of failing (or has failed).
I wouldn't waste time with chkdsk since it looks like it's just making professional data recovery harder if you decide to send it away. WD has some software to test the health of their drives - that should have been the first step. Is it an internal or external? You could also try moving it to another SATA port with a new cable on the off (slim) chance that you have a failing cable/connection. You also may have some luck with photorec recovery program but who knows at this point.
 


At this point I'm just trying to recover my source files that were used in my video only. I've run some recovery programs but they couldn't find all the files. The video files were nowhere to be found. I've let everything else go since this isn't the first time this happened to me. This link here (6th one is what my error is) suggests that I format the drive and I might try that since I can't recover my files anyway. Oh I have checked the cables and the drive externally and could not see anything wrong. I might also try with new cables but since there are some lost files I think this problem is internal. Thank you for your answer.
 
Solution
Maybe run MHDD to see what is happening to your drive? It is free and you can diagnose many things (head crash etc...) so you will know what to do or not. Also it will tell you if the drive is RDY (ready) or not...which you want to know...
 
I've saved what I can and formatted the partition. I couldn't save everything but I managed to grab the essentials. Now I can use the hard disk without any problems. I will be more cautious and take regular backups from now on. Thank you.