External HDD Issue

[Harbringer]

I have a Western Digital 1 TB external hard drive, that was working perfectly for about a year and 6 months. A while back (about 7 months) the hard drive made the world's nastiest sound when it was booting up. I bought a new Western Digital Elements 1.5 TB external the other day so I could hopefully back up important data. Here's where things got frustrating.

The external took a few minutes to actually boot and show up in Win7, and when it was plugged in it gave me an error like "the recycle bin on drive G is corrupted. would you like to empty it?" and other times an i/o failure. If it is of any importance, the i/o failure occurs ONLY when I attempt to access my movies folder, and after that, the hdd crashes, and explorer.exe holds up the process.

Any ideas as to what's going on? It's very frustrating to have lost all this data.

 

[johnlgalt]

I'd try running a Scandisk on the drive after it boots up (without actually trying to see anything on the drive - IOW, don't open Windows Explorer and try to view that Movies folder).

It sounds like the drive may have experienced a physical crash, and you will probably have some data loss, but if Scandisk can find the issues / associated areas where the drive crashed, it may be able to fix the parts of that folder / the entire drive that are good and salvage a good amount of your data.