I was transferring many files to an external mechanical USB3 exFAT formatted HD and suddenly the usb cable was slightly moved, causing an error. It was not clear why that happened, maybe the socket on my old laptop has a bit loosened in the years (reason why I was moving data before changing PC).
The LED on the HD turned from blue (USB3 link) to white (USB2 fallback mode) and windows asked me if I wanted to retry the file transfer that had been interrupted due to the disk disappearance.
I confirmed, the interrupted file transfer was completed and the following ones continued moving, at lower speed. After a while I got suspicious and stopped the transfer, safely disconnected the drive, reconnected it, and windows alerted me on errors on the filesystem that had to be fixed to avoid losing data. I did not let it do it, launched the chkdsk command readonly, and got no error whatsoever, then I retried disconnecting/reconnecting, getting the same warning. Now, I have some questions for whoever is expert on this kind of topics:
- Why is there an alert, but I cannot find an error? What can have happened?
- May the incident have damaged data previously on the disk?
- Is it wise to let windows fix whatever it is trying to fix, or it might damage the data furthermore?
PS: the device was set for “Quick removal”, not for “Better performance”, but I guess that accidental removal has been too quick.
