Inaccessible External HDD

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Stepfly

PCHF Member
Jul 15, 2020
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Hey

Hoping for some help with a faulty, probably dying external hard drive. Apologies in advance for any incorrect terms. I’m not very tech savvy. Working on an Intel i3 8GB Ram. Windows 10 Home. It’s an older Seagate 2TB external HDD with its own plug in power.

When connected device takes a few minutes to register, but when it does – in windows explorer – my pc “sees” it, & shows folders, files at the top level of the hierarchy. I’m able to click through to the folders. See the files within. Seems “accessible”.

However, after between 5-10 mins of being connected it disconnects and I get a ‘The last USB device you connected to this computer malfunctioned, Windows does not recognize it' error msg.

No clicking or beeping sounds from the drive itself. Sounds as if operating normally.

I ran CHKDSK as an administrator. This was the output:

1 chkdsk b.jpg


Reading up on “The Disk Does Not Have Enough Space to Replace Bad Clusters” I installed and ran Victoria (v5.28). It sees the drive, but any attempt to run S.M.A.R.T. on it causes the drive to disconnect as per above. Tried an earlier build of Victoria (4.3), but that just outputs an: “error reading S.M.A.R.T!” message.

Any advice on what I could try next would be really great.

I want to get as much of the content files – images, video, text – off if I can.

If not, could I clone or take an image of the drive – and how do I retrieve the files once I’ve done so? If that wasn’t possible, simply getting a file list so I can work out what I’m losing would be something.

Many thanks if you can help.

Stepfly
 
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