Kris Allen - 2019-01-30

I have an external HDD with a hidden veracrypt partition. Sometimes the USB connection from my laptop to the external drives gets accidentally disconnected physically, although I do not think this happened while copying or accessing files. As this is a 3+TB partition, I tend to ignore the warning that filesystem is dirty as doing a chkdsk would take at least 8+ hours. Last week I noticed that while copying a file from the external drive it was now having a hard time accessing a folder in the disk, so much so that it seemed to have hanged. As I could not wait for the drive to finish I had to disconnect it already.

Later that night I ran chkdsk (via the popup when mounting a dirty volume via veracrypt) and left it running overnight. There were quite a number of repairs made, but in the end the job failed because it ran out of disk space ("The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters..."). Now the partition still had 300GB of space left, so I thought maybe I just need to free up disk space. I also began to transfer my files out of the external drive. While transfering I noticed that a lot of files were affected and had difficulty being copied out of the drive. In the end it forced me to do a lot more physical disconnecting because of the hang state of the drive.

Now that I got the number up to around 700GB I wanted to try to do a chkdsk again. However, chkdsk won't even run anymore. It now says "A media error has been detected. Bad sectors may be present on the volume." and then abruptly ends without even going through Step 1.

I have also checked the physical disk and the SMART status has a warning on current pending sector count (raw value at 000000000461). BTW, this is a fairly new disk, only purchased in July 2018 -- so having these problems is very frustrating. Add to that the fact that I just transferred data from my three old HDDs to this new one really hurts.

I can still access the disk and copy some files out. Most files stop midway and then I get the error: "Can't read from the source file or disk." Sometimes I get lucky and get to copy a fully healthy file. Sometimes it stops and the transfer speed goes to zero but then magically pushes through and is able to finish the copy. While I'm happy that at least I can still salvage some data, this is still 3TB of data, and its taking too long to keep on doing this. Any solution to my problem? Will I ever be able to recover my other files? Any help would be greatly appreciated.