WD Elements gone crazy!

[marty269]

So, yesterday I was copying some files on to my WD Elements external 1tb hd. Every thing was great, its about 18 months old. An hour later i plug it back in and it takes ages tp pop up in my computer. I clicked on it and it freezes. I eject and repeat with the same result. It shows up in Devices but right clicking takes ages to respond. Now, half the time it wont pop up when plugged in and half the time it will but will be very, very slow and can freeze for 5 minutes then pop back up. I am desperately trying to get my data off but to transfer about 1 gig is taking about 4 hours and thats if it dosent freeze and fail. I have 987gb of data which I really dont want to loose. Please, any advice would be really appreciated.

 

[popatim]

Your drive appears to be having a hardware issue.
I'm sorry but all you can do is wait and keep trying.
You do have an option of sending the drive out for data recovery but that is very expensive.

I Hope you get data back.

In the future, please remember that any important data needs to have a backup copy kept on another device entirely. This would be a second copy of the data; you want to avoid only having one copy since you never know when a device will fail. More copies on other devices would help keep your data even safer.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo?

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

To recover your data you may need to apply the "slow fix". A tool such as HDDSuperTool can do this, but it runs on Linux.

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts/wd_royl_patch_mod02?attredirects=0&d=1
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/scripts/wd_royl_patch_mod32?attredirects=0&d=1

 

[popatim]

Have you used this yet? I saw posts of it on hddguru years ago but never tried it myself.

 

[fzabkar]

I haven't needed it, but other users report success. In fact the "WD slow fix" is a standard procedure used by data recovery shops. Tools such as WDMarvel have a single-click fix for this problem. Note that this isn't a fix per se, it's merely a workaround that disables background processes. In the old days there were publicly available, vendor specific commands that users could apply to their ailing drives.

For example, Quantum drives implemented two Vendor Specific Commands (SET CONFIGURATION and READ CONFIGURATION) which were fully documented in the publicly available product manuals. These allowed the user to specify various error recovery parameters. For example, one could disable correction or reallocation, and specify the number of retries.

See section 6.7.18 of the "Quantum Fireball TM 1.0/1.2/1.7/2.1/2.5/3.2/3.8GB AT Product Manual".

... and http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1192&start=60#p6037