hi all. so my HDD problem actually stems from a physical accident. My laptop fell a small distance - only about 12 inches from the floor. But my battery on my laptop recently stopped working - so as it fell, the power cable came out and the laptop turned off suddenly as well.

When i started up the computer the next day windows got stuck on its loading screen. I restarted, it got through the loading screen fine this time but then got stuck on a blank screen with just a cursor. After a few minutes i forced a restart and ran chkdsk /f from the windows startup repair dialog.

It ran fine, then got stuck on one sector ( i think this was in stage 2 of 5) for about 10 minutes. Then it listed a few things it fixed and continued running. Again it ran fine and got stuck on one sector for a long period. I thought itd be safer to exit chkdsk and backup the files i could, so i attached it to another computer via an external HDD caddy.

The other computer saw the disk and its files perfectly well. I transferred over my important documents without a problem - thousands of files and around 100gb all quickly. Then I tried to transfer over a video file in different folder and again it got stuck, moving very slowly, so i cancelled it.

I ran HDD Scan in verify mode and it ran very slowly compared to my other healthy external HDD - with various red blocks showing.

I guessed i had bad sectors on my drive so i ran a demo copy of HDD Regenerator on it. It didnt find bad sectors but found many many "delays" and ran very slowly. It then said something about telling me to connect it internally as it was running too slow, so it thought the USB was to blame.

So anyone know what the problem is here? There are no "clicking" sounds that i have heard on dying HDDs before. When it gets "stuck", i can just hear the normal HDD access sound for a second, then a pause, then the sound again and a pause and so on. I know the safe option is to get a new HDD but id really prefer to not spend the money/time on that. Thinking that perhaps this might be some kind of corrupt data issue i can fix? Any help would be appreciated.

You need professional assistance if data is of value. If not, trash it (or RMA it if in warranty) and replace it.

I don't think he needs the data, sounds like he's copied what he need off.

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Really, don't bother. You may be able to hide the existing bad/weak sectors with software temporarily, but you're just making a ticking time bomb for yourself!

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More than likely you have massive light scratch all the way along one of the drives platters and since video files use a LOT of space, they are the ones suffering. Basicly, once you have copied all your work off, you will have to bite the bullet and download all the video files of the net, or if its personal videos, try and run the scandisk until all the data area is scanned. This will take a long time, but it will map all the bad sectors and will allow you to get most of the video, but parts might be crupted. The drive is toast, so once you got all you can, bin it and get a new one.

Shane

I meant scandisk or some other took eqivilent that can scan and mark bad the surface area for bad clusters.

Shane

Clone your HDD.
Use ddrescue (linux).
If you're not familiar with terminal you can do it with DMDE or hdclone.

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