I want to share my experience on successful tackling of rather unexpected and seemingly insoluble issue with my external HDD (preformatted as exFAT).
A couple of days back when I hooked up my 8TB My Book to a notebook with Win8, which I had been doing quite regularly and without any hassles, all of a sudden the system popped up an intimidating message that Windows discovered errors on the drive and suggested that they should be checked and fixed.
But the checkup (first done from a menu, then with the standard chkdsk tool from a command prompt) eventually failed returning advice to scan the HDD once more. All other subsequent attempts appeared futile. The system said it spotted the errors and refused to sort them out. Apparently the HDD has been marked as “dirty” and read-only.
I suspected that the problem was more likely attributed to the faulty USB port or outdated system drivers or whatever else, rather than my fairly new (several months old) HDD, which I used to treat like a princess. The suspicion grew when I double checked the disk with WD Drive Utilities and Data LifeGuard Diagnostics and all the tests, including overnight 15hrs thorough physical sector-by-sector scan (more than 15.6bn sectors on an 8TB disc by the way) passed without any issues. Now when I was 200 pct confident that my disk is in no way “dirty” and the problem lies in Windows checking and error reporting pattern, I focused my online search on the instructions on how I can get rid of the annoying and unreasonable notification preventing normal disc usage.
I watched numerous dumb youtube instructions, the majority of which reduced to “simple and reliable procedure” involving… chkdsk (which, as I said, never worked in my case). How original!
Some enthusiasts advised to manipulate with HEX-editor to remove dirty bit marking, to upgrade drivers, to reinstall Windows, and finally suggested that the SAFEST if not the SOLE solution for the drive with exFAT is unavoidably backup-reformat-copy trick (which, in terms of a large capacity drive, may take days to complete).
When I was so desperate, on the verge of resorting to the latter variant, I incidentally came across an interesting thread discussing the inadequacy of standard chkdsk tool, which is incapable of proper addressing the exFAT volumes integrity.
It turned out in this regard that Microsoft had long ago proposed a small hotfix for the chkdsk tool:
They say it is designed for Windows 7 or Windiws Server 2008, but its 64-bit version fitted my Win8 64bit machine like a glove.
After installing the hotfix I plugged the “doomed” WD My Book to a USB3.0 port. The message on the (nonexistent) errors expectedly popped up suggesting again to check the disk, which I willingly did. But this time the checkdisk finally did its job right. It took a mere 20 seconds to implement a short scan, after which the system advised that my HDD is clean and has no errors.
From now on my favorite My Book purrs like a cat, without any issues whatsoever.
Hope this may be helpful for somebody out there, who had enough patience to read my entire post. Good luck.
