I have a 2TB WD Elements WD20SMZW. I’ve been using it to backup my files for a few years. I’m not using it often, it was working fine until one time I had an error while writing some new files for backup. It was NTFS error, system couldn’t read content of directory. Chkdsk fixed it, but during next backup I had the same error with the same directory.
I have stopped the backup and a few days later I wanted to check some files before formatting that HDD. More directories became unreadable and some files couldn’t open. HDD was working for a few minutes each time when read error has occured and the program trying to open file was freezed for that time. Also couldn’t do anything else when the drive was working on reading damaged file, like the drive was freezing any software using the drive. SMART had thousands of read errors and unstable sectors.
I was about to give up checking files and just wanted to format it, but the drive kinda freezed itself completely. After almost two hours I safely unmounted it from Windows. I unplugged it and plugged in again. Now HDD is getting “locked” instantly when system tries to read it. Task manager says usage is 100%, but no data is transferred.
I have tried formatting it with Linux. Gparted needed a few minutes to read information about partitions, then formatting attempt took almost one hour but it failed because write error. Drive’s head was moving like it was working on something during that write attempt. dd also didn’t work. I didn’t try mounting that NTFS partition because it was not working on Windows.
I don’t need to recover any data, I just want to know if there’s a way I could somehow repair this HDD to use it for backups again. I was always carrying it carefully so if this is a physical damage it’s probably because this HDD is SMR. Maybe it’s just firmware doing something wrong, I don’t know.
