My WD Elements disk, AKS WD20NMVW-11AV3S4 all of the sudden looked like an unformatted drive. It was a NTFS formated drive under Windows 10 Pro. I tried to run a disk recover tool against it. This tool showed a few files from the disk. But before attempting to fix anything, the the tool suggested i make a Clone of the drive first.

When running the clone tool, I waited for 4 1/2 hours and it didn't seem to be making any progress or was even able to yet give an estimated time. So I tried another tool. it also was taking forever just initially reading sectors (300K sectors in 45 mins.).

I opened up the Performance tab of the Task Manager to see stats while it was trying to read the sectors. The "Active time" was 100% but the "Average response time" was 0, jumping to 2000 ms. The "Read speed" every 5 to 10 seconds would briefly go from 0 to on average 100 KB/s.

They system is having a very hard time reading. There is no unusual noise coming from the HD at all.

At this rate, it would take me forever to clone this disk if it works in the end or not.

Any theories about what is happening here and what can be done?

Probably a "slow responding" fix (search forum) might make it respond a little quicker, but won't fix the underlying issues that have triggered the situation.

Drive almost certainly has bad sectors, and possibly suspect/bad head(s).

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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I agree with Sean. If your data is of any value, it might be worth seeking professional data recovery assistance. It should be a simple and relatively cheap recovery right now, with a reputable lab.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Try the "slow fix" with HDDSuperTool (freeware).

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

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A backup a day keeps DR away.