[SOLVED] WD External Hard Disk sudden RAW FS

[khanorak]

Hello great community,

I have a 500GB Western Digital My Passport Essentials Hard Disk. I bought it back in 2011.
I had created partitions of 460 GB and 5GB.

Today when I plugged it into my laptop, it got detected, the smaller 5GB partition was okay but it didn't show the VOLUME (the blue bar) of the bigger partition. It seemed as if it is reading it continuously but I couldn't open it.

When I opened Disk Management, it showed 460GB RAW partition. So upon further searching, I found a chkdisk command:

chkdsk #: /f

I ran it for a couple of hours. It fixed it somehow. I was able to open the drive and currently I am copying my important data off this drive.

Please note that it didn't make any noise of clicks and beeps.

Now the real Problem. I ran CrystalDisk and it showed some CURRENT PENDING SECTOR COUNT. Here is the attached image.

As of now, the drive is working ok but given the number of failures after such bad sector appearances, I think it is not OK and might die soon. Any help will be appreciated.


UPDATE:

So I zeroized the hard drive as suggested by @D_Know_WD and the badsectors are not there anymore and the health status has also gone to GOOD. I am copying some data to it and will be keeping an eye out for the bad sectors.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there khanorak,

It is good that you have managed to back up all your data.
Unfortunately, the drive seems to have bad sectors related issue. I guess you can use it but I wouldn't advise you to keep important data on it. There is no way to stop this process(bad sectors appearing). You can eventually keep an eye on this(testing from time to time) and see when these values deteriorate.

It will not hurt to test it with WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool as well.

WD's DLG too: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=X5iyuo

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[JayCee993]

Did the CHKDSK reformat the drive or did it just try to repair the bad sectors, the health of this hard drive isn't in a critical state at the moment but make sure that you back this hard drive up.
Reformatting the drive can sometimes repair pending sectors of which there are 77 unstable secors at the moment, just keep an eye on the bad sector count and if it starts to increase rapidly I would replace the drive

 

[khanorak]

Thanks D_Know_WD. Yes I am backing up my data.

@JayCee93. It didn't reformat the hard drive. The main partition was in RAW format so it somehow fixed it and all the Data was there. So I am copying it to another drive.

What is the average life of an external hard disk anyway? I didn't drop it or used it rough. Is it normal after 4 years or so?

 

[JayCee993]

Just sitting there connected to a computer i would say that the average lifetime for a WD Passport could be 4-6 Years, Knock that down a year or 2 if your travelling alot with the drive but like any mechanical drive you could wake up tomorrow and "Hard Drive Says No..."

 

[D_Know_WD]

Usually, external drives tend to have shorter lifetime than the internals. I doubt that someone could give a precise answer on what is the normal lifespan of an external drive. I would say around 3 - 5 years.
Apart from that, with the DLG tool I have already mentioned, you can try writing zeros on the drive, retest it and see whether you will get similar results. This process could take some time though.

D_Know_WD

 

[khanorak]

Usually, external drives tend to have shorter lifetime than the internals. I doubt that someone could give a precise answer on what is the normal lifespan of an external drive. I would say around 3 - 5 years.
Apart from that, with the DLG tool I have already mentioned, you can try writing zeros on the drive, retest it and see whether you will get similar results. This process could take some time though.

D_Know_WD

I downloaded the DLG tool and will report back after writing zeros. thanks for the heads-up.

 

[khanorak]

bump! first post updated.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Most probably these were some software bad sectors(not hardware ones). This is why the zeroing process helped.
Anyway, it is good that you have sorted this out.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD