Affected Drive: Storage drive, WD Green 2 TB, less than a year old.
Contents: No programs, no OS, only data (video, text, audio).
Scenario: When accessing a certain folder on my secondary drive, Windows Explorer stopped responding. I ended task, Explorer came back, and I tried to access the folder again. This time it caused Windows to freeze (no blue screen, just frozen, unresponsive). Upon restarting my PC, despite the drive having nothing to do with the boot (being a storage drive with no programs) it has made my computer’s start-up time slow from ~20 seconds to ~20 minutes. It does successfully turn on eventually, and after signing in it will bring up my desktop, but will freeze at various times, to the point where it never actually gets fully booted up (it will sit there frozen for at least thirty minutes). I know it is not actually frozen, as when I hit the power off button on the case, it suddenly snaps out of being frozen and begins to shut down normally. The shut down screen (after logging off and saying “shutting down”) also takes an excessive amount of time.
Current Work Arounds: Removing the drive. Everything works as it did before.
My Questions:
If this is a problem any of you have encountered before, what is wrong with my drive and what are my options?
If this is an unknown problem;
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Do you think it is possible to recover any data from the drive? If so, how?
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If I cannot recover, can I make the drive operational again? If so, how?
Finally, any suggestions on how I can avoid this from happening again would be very welcome.
If there are any troubleshooting suggestions, I’m happy to try them. I’ve already tried swapping where it’s plugged in to on the motherboard to no avail. Any additional information you need, just ask.
Thank you for helping.
Is your main drive a WD too? If so can you disconnect your 2TB drive, restart, download and make a bootable disk of Data Lifeguard Diagnostic from WD, then shutdown, reconnect your 2TB drive and boot to Data Lifeguard Diagnostic disk, then test both drives.
You might also try switching your power connecters to make sure they all work (could be a power supply problem). Has there been any lightning in your town lately?
Try running a full virus scan on your good drive with the 2TB drive disconnected.
Make sure all cables, RAM, and cards are seated. I’ve seen cards come loose when moving the PC from on house to another.
Do both drives show up in the BIOS?
Are both drives SATA or PATA or a combination, is one drive on one channel and the other on the other channel, has anyone changed the jumpers.
Try the drive in another PC if possible.
Sorry-Good Luck!
My main drives are WD as well (RAID, striped). I’ll definitely try this diagnostic tool.
As for power, I should be tip-top, and all 3 of my drives are powered by the same cord (so I can’t imagine that being a problem). As far as storms, nothing excessive (none around the time of me finding it defective), and my PC is connected to a UPS.
And yes, the drive shows up in the BIOS. I actually did an entire check of my system last night, rewired, etc. to make sure nothing was wrong (also, the cable management was a mess). No change.
Now we’re leaving my areas of knowledge. All my drives should be SATA (in that I never changed them and am the only user), unsure for channels, and no one has changed anything (whether that be good or bad).
I am planning on trying it ASAP in a friend’s PC once he’s back in town.
This problem first happened a few weeks ago, and many a virus scan has been done since then by automation. Also, I don’t torrent, or any other use that might make me believe it could be at risk for such a thing. I’ll try out this diagnostic tool and see what comes out, thanks a lot for the suggestions.
The diagnostic actually didn’t recognize any WD drives. Not odd for my RAID striped, as they are classified as one “Intel” drive in the BIOS, but odd for the storage drive which has its proper code (and should have been recognized). I’ll still wait out to try it with another PC at the very least before I think about returning on warranty.
