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I have a Seagate external USB 1TB drive. It seemed to be working fine. As a routine maintenance, I did a CHKDSK /f /r on it. To my surprise, CHKDSK reported a lot of errors at stage 1, 2, 3, 4. Stage 4 was taking a long time. So, I prematurely killed the process and ran it again. This time, stage 1 and 2 seemed to be OK, reporting no problem, but stage 3 and 4 still had problems. I then used Windows 10 utility disk management to format the disk. The process went well. After that, I copied some files to the disk and they were OK. I then ran CHKDSK. Again, it gave a lot of errors at stage 1, 2, 3, 4.

I formatted it again and then ran CHKDSK without copying files to the newly formatted disk. CHKDSK went through state 1, 2, 3, 4 in less than a second but stuck at stage 5, ETA kept increasing, from 92 to 130. I killed the process again and formatted the drive using DISKPART command "format fn=ntfs", not a quick format. The process went well but CHKDSK still had the same problem at stage 5, i.e. taking forever. I then tried EaseUS and Aomei's Partition Assistance to check the disk. Both, after running for more than 4 hours, didn't pass the first 10% and seemed to be stuck.

Is it time to ditch the disk? It would be the third, and the last, external USＢ disk to ditch. I don't seem to have good luck with large size USB disks.

[update] I boot to DOS and ran fdisk. Many cylinders are having problems. They take forever to finish. So, the obvious thing to do is throw them away.

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    Its likely that the disk is faulty (although this could conceivably be related to you just removing the USB cable from it or powering down the computer suddenly). Try and look at the S.M.A.R.T info for the disk to help determine if its hardware related.
    – davidgo
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 5:24
  • Is the disk still under warranty? If not, try to open the case of the HDD, pull off the chip, buy a SATA data cable, you will also need a SATA power cable, though your computer probably has spares, connect the disk directly to the motherboard and PSU, to make it internal, then use diskpart clean all and format to wipe the disk, then run chkdsk again, be warned, this will clear all data on the HDD, so make sure you have copied all important data from the HDD before doing it.
    – Ξένη Γήινος
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 14:18
  • @ Xeнεi Ξэnвϵς This is a USB disk, not a HDD. Seatools says it's a SCSI disk. So, I'm not sure your suggestion would work. Thanks, anyway.
    – joehua
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 22:59

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If you are running Windows 10 you might have fallen victim to a faulty chkdsk update.

Error description in German language: https://www.heise.de/news/Windows-10-Microsoft-behebt-Probleme-mit-chkdsk-nach-fehlerhaftem-Update-4997752.html

Microsoft information (English): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/december-8-2020-kb4592438-os-builds-19041-685-and-19042-685-a548ef85-dec5-e58e-0c33-206784bfcf91

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  • Should I install or uninstall KB4592438? It was installed a month ago.
    – joehua
    Commented Jan 28, 2021 at 1:28
  • You need to check your update level. If you received the faulty update you would need to read on microsoft.com what to do to get rid of it or mitigate the problem.
    – r2d3
    Commented Jan 28, 2021 at 10:11

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