Damaged HDD data recovery

[polara]

Hi everyone,

I have an old HDD drive, Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 5400 RPM 500 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s, that i use for data storage as an external drive using an USB 3.0 SATA adapter.

Yesterday i was transfering some files from it to my PC and suddenly something went wrong.

Windows 10 reported: Error 0x800701E3: The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error.

Once i unplugged it from the PC and replugged, no informations appeared on Windows Explorer for about 15 minutes of “charging” This PC bar. After that i was able to access, however it was very slow and once i tried to simply copy all the data to recover them, everything seemed stuck and after a while the same error showed up again.

I tried chkdsk command from MS-DOS with command /f /r but after getting into Phase 4 the search was blocked on 0% for a couple of hours.

I gently ask help to recover these important data for me, if it is possible in some way. I wait for you for any suggestion that could possibly solve this trouble.

I want to say thank you in advance for your help, i hope everything will be fine.

Cheers.

[northwind]

chkdsk was a terrible idea, it should never be ran against a degrading drive.

Most possibly your drive has a weak head or media damage. I'm sorry to say that only someone with professional equipment and know-how could help you.
If I'm right, powering on the drive any longer can only make things worse.

[northwind]

By the way, before anything else, it'd be a good idea to connect the drive to a SATA port and not through USB, to rule out any inconsistencies with the USB dock station/cable etc.