External hard drive slow file access and crashing

Question

I think my WD Elements 1TB external HDD probably crashed as I was suddenly no longer able to access my files without Windows Explorer crashing first and then Windows freezing until I forcefully unplug the HDD every time.

Things I've tried:

1. Trying to navigate the drive via CMD in safe mode and even startup repair would be too slow.

2. Running chkdsk which takes forever and then I need to forcefully terminate the process.

3. I tried different OSs (various distributions of Linux and versions of Windows) and machines with no luck.

So basically although all of the files are still intact, it takes extremely long to view them, let alone execute or copy them.

There are a few peculiarities to this issue:

1. As soon as I plug the HDD in, I have an insanely small time-frame of about 20 seconds wherein I am able to execute CMD commands to navigate the drive at completely normal speeds. After 20 seconds, the read speed drops down again.

2. I'm able to change permissions or take ownership of files or folders with a few batch files (in that 20 second time-frame) I created and surprisingly enough, for the files and folders of which I was able to take ownership and full control, I could read or at least view them via Windows Explorer at normal speeds, i.e. I could now access the folders or the files at normal read speeds, but the time-frame just isn't enough for me to change permissions and ownership on all files in the HDD, nor is it enough for copying major files to the internal HDD.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to execute any files that were now viewable due to the permissions change.

Keeping the above in mind, I think the HDD isn't gone yet, and I might still be able to recover 100% of my files.

I don't know what to infer from these observations, so any help on the issue is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming that you are saying that at some point the drive failed in some way and you were/are no longer able to access the data previously stored on that drive, and now the drive is exhibiting the symptoms the rest of your question describes:

Your drive is essentially dead and you should not use it, and all the symptoms you're now experiencing are basically death throes.

Once a drive loses data, and especially when it loses all of its data like you described, you can no longer trust it.

The rest of the symptoms you describe can all be explained as the drive working briefly and then failing again, which is also normal on dead/dying drives.

Depending on how valuable the data you lost is, you may want to pursue data recovery, in which case you don't want to plug the drive in again until you've decided how you're going to go about that.

Otherwise, the drive is toast and should be tossed.

UPDATE

If you are trying to recover data, you should be reading this community wiki: How do I recover lost/inaccessible data from my storage device?