I have a WD 4TB external I've been using now for a couple of years and this past weekend it failed on me. This used to be my passport drive which was in its enclosure but since moved out after the PCB board failed, I was able to recover the drive and use it since.

I noticed that the drive was causing my system to hang all of a sudden and I started troubleshooting.

When connected via USB 3.0 dock, I see the drive in explorer but no space usage bar below. Also, Disk management does not show it and also Diskpart.

I also tried other USB ports along with another dock I had on hand with no change.

The drive is spinning and I see the activity light blinking on the dock.

I tried using Ease data recovery and while it was hanging up my system and this application for populating my drives, I decided to turn the drive off and what followed was the Ease data recovery screen showing me my available drives to scan *showing me this problem drive and its 3.6 TB of used space*

(believe I tried Ease partition recovery as well but it wasn't showing anything for this drive)

I then turned the drive back on and clicked scan drive, while it was scanning this drive for all the files..I attempted to do a chkdsk E: /r /f in cmd with admin and after 10 minutes waiting for it to go anywhere, it started scanning and on stage 3, it gave an error showing "Journal error could not be read" or something.

My hope is i can fix this partition somehow and not lose my data (yes i should have backed it up, lesson learned).

Is this effort futile? anything else I can try, please?

Anyone please?

Drive spins up and i hear what sounds like a click every 30 seconds. Windows sees the drive but unable to access.

Pic attached showing results from chkdsk.

yes
send it to A pro


bad idea

...anyone else?

Could we start with a SMART report?

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

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

your driver has severe bad sectors. + head weak or damaged. scandisk and recovery software doing more damages of this kind of drivea. i think, your head problem came out after running this programes.

i think still this hard canbe recoverd without head swapping.sometimes.
but you should contact DR centre.

Could you get the SMART status, as requested by fzabkar ?
If there's any suspicion of a physical issue, and no backup, running CHKDSK is a (very) bad idea. Scanning a defective drive with data recovery softwares is also a bad idea, because you don't actually recover anything during the scan, whatever is read is going to have to be read again (if at all possible) at the extraction stage, at which point the condition might have further degraded, meaning that the data which was barely read earlier can no longer be actually recovered.
If you are (very) lucky, it may still be possible to clone or image the whole drive, with only a few defective spots, using ddrescue or HDDSuperClone (and then scan the clone or image with a recovery software, or several – once the data is stored on a healthy drive various attempts can be made to retrieve as many valid files as possible), but if indeed there's a head issue, you're in for a lot of trouble (especially if the 4TB HDD is nearly full – as this can happen), and even that method (which is on the low end of the data recovery skills spectrum) requires a good deal of in-depth understanding of the intricacies of HDD operation. Arguably if you did what you did you don't have it, therefore the advice of handing it out to a data recovery professional is a wise one – and it could be cheaper to do this now rather than messing with the drive further and having then to pay a premium to get it done by a pro anyway once it becomes clear that there's no other option, and getting an inferior recovery rate in the end.

@Dananjaya
What makes you think that there is definitely a head issue ? The clicking sounds ? Couldn't these be calibration noises ? What would a pattern like “one click every 30 seconds” correspond to, technically ?