Hi, noob here. I have a question, maybe this forum can help.
I have a Toshiba external HDD that I bought to back up my files. It was working for some time, but now I am experiencing serious problems with files on it. I cannot access number of folders and files. When I select the folder to open it, the HDD doesn't open it and just gets stuck. The only thing I can do is to unplug it from USB. So I have no access to the files in those folders.
Can anyone recommend me how to solve this? The files were not deleted, I just can open folders. And in other folders I can access the file (video), but when I select it to play the HDD gets stuck again.
I also tried to copy them to other HDD, unsuccessfully. The Windows just shows me an error in copy process and asks me to try again or cancel. I went lightly through the posts and articles in this forum and it seems that I can't find the answer. Can anyone help me with advice? Thank you.

Do you care about the data or the drive?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Best method ,
open hdd case and make it sata interface and clone it asap .bad sectors imho

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Of course I do.



Not sure what you mean by "open hdd case" and how to clone it. Do you mean by connecting sata cable directly to it? Is it different than copying through usb? Not sure it is even possible, it is small 2.5 hdd, I don't think it even has sata output.

Anyway, after browsing google and trying to find free recovery tools, I've tried number of them and failed - some did HDD analysis that showed me a lot of bad sectors, but the tools got stuck on 57% of the test so I had to force close them. Then I found another tool, that is not free, bit it did free scanning very fast and I saw that it did find all my files. So I downloaded cracked version and I've managed successfully to recover all of my data by copying it to another location, I am doing it right now. This tool is surprisingly effective, so I'm happy.

My followup question is what should I do with the damaged HDD? Can I wipe it so clean that I can use it again? What are the chances that it will malfunction right away? Or is it became unreliable and I better not use it at all?
Thank you.

USB is less reliable for this sort of thing, is why. All external cases use standard drives.

Not going to make you popular around here, LOL. A lot of these people write those tools, although some are free. Sad to see free utilities be lonely while commercial ones get ripped, as well. ;( I'm answering your questions only because I'm being nice.


If it fails ever, even once, do not trust it. Use it as a DVR or something else that the files lose value on their own after a short time. DVR's expire files due to DRM.

Good to know that.

Thank you for being nice.

What is a good way to format it thoroughly? I mean, wipe it really clean and to avoid damaged sectors.
Thanks.

HDDScan will tell you what parts of the drive have the most delayed reads/writes... or kill the drive for good while trying to find them, heh. You can partition only the areas with the best stability in read/write speeds (smoothest parts of curve on graph). Believe it or not, most formatting tools are decent at finding bad sectors. Sadly, they're not as aggressive as some would like. I used to hex-edit FAT32 drives to map out clusters near existing bad clusters as "Bad" even though they tested good based on a theory based on experience. Score 1 for empiricalism! Worked good enough for temporary storage of files that I planned on deleting after done. These drives are never to be trusted again - just saying. NTFS is not quite so trivial to do this with. It would be nice if there was an automated tool to do this in the the $BadCluster metafile or if there was a more aggressive format that did this.

Can you post a link to the genuine version?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.