Hi, I hope somebody can help me out here please.

Over the last week my plug and play Toshiba MQ01UBB200 HDD has been playing up. It has been making unusual sounds. When I go to play some .WAV music files, part of the track plays and then it freezes. I've tried to recover files directly from the HDD through Disk Drill and EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, some have been recoverable although these tracks weren't freezing before recovering them i've found. The tracks which have been freezing, only part of the files have been recovered, i.e. 10+ seconds of a 5+ minute track. I can't even drag and drop certain files from the HDD to my desktop.

On Disk Drill, there's a section on the software indicating ''1 issue(s) found'' and next to it in red, it states ''05 Reallocated Sectors Count 0x0033 1 16376 50 Bad'' I've no idea what this means? Is there a way to fix it? Fortunately I had some of the stuff backed up elsewhere but there's some stuff i'd like to get back I ripped/recorded from vinyl.

I've tried to recover these remaining files from my C: drive as that's where I originally ripped/recorded them to through Audacity from April 2025 to present before I transferred them to my Toshiba MQ01UBB200 HDD and after I done that, I moved them to my recycling bin before I selected ''Empty Recycle Bin'' however both Disk Drill and EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can't find the files I deleted after scanning my C: drive?

https://ibb.co/21PZgYJ1
https://ibb.co/8nFQD99W

Screenshots from HDtune

https://imgur.com/a/oC6jV49
https://imgur.com/a/RDws57H

Your drive is very sick. Your best DIY approach would be to clone it with a tool that understands how to work with bad sectors or bad heads, then recover your data from the clone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/hddsuperclone_guide/

That said, be prepared for your HDD to die during the attempt.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.