Video playing error's & taking a long time to fully open a folder containing videos

I was recently tansferring data from another external hard drive to my current one. In the middle of the process the cord was accidentally ripped out and since that point my hard drive hasn’t worked properly. When opening the hard drive in windows explorer it takes an average of 1-3 minutes for it to fully open. From there I try to open a folder containing videos and that takes another 1-3 minutes to fully open. I can see all the files I have but when I try to play videos using VLC or windows media player, they will either not play at all or play for a few seconds then begin to skip and lag. I’ve never had this problem before. I tried hooking it up to a TV that has USB ports and it didn’t read it. Would formatting the hard drive help? Thank you for your assistance I greatly appreciate it.

Yes, you can try formatting the drive

you can also test the drive for problems with chkdsk or any other software

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If I format the drive does that delete all the data I have on it? And if so, is there a way to recover it?

Yup

backup the data prior to formatting