Hey there!
Glad to see i’m not the only one who met the same issue.
I can’t say that I found a solution but I think i’m getting somewhere.
I left the drive plugged in overnight with chkdsk running. And I woke up to it recognised by the PC although still inaccessible, and chkdsk got stuck at stage 2. Also I got a message saying I need to format the drive befire I can use it.
I tried to take advantage of the drive being recognised and listed.
I used a software called Victoria to assess the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive. And it appears that i have about 3008 pending sectors and a bunch of bad ones which I assume are causing the issue. (Btw, it’s a 5 years old mechanical drive, not sure if age affects performance)
I then scanned the drive using iBoysoft data recovery: https://iboysoft.com/data-recovery/free-data-recovery.html. To my surprise my files are still there and the folder structure is in place too. Then i successfully get all my lost file back. Great!
