Why does my WD 4TB is 'stuck' with 99% done & 5 seconds to go for the past 4 hours?

I purchased yesterday a WD 4TB external drive to backup my computer (C:/WINDOWS).

I plugged it and started the backup YESTERDAY (Monday, March 30 at about 5pm). It is now Tuesday, 24 hours later and the screen shows that it has copied 99% of the items and that it will be finished in 5 SECONDS, and still keeps flashing files that I am assuming it is copying, but the items remaining is 0 with 0 bytes.

How can I get it to stop? Is it 'stuck" or really copying files in the background that are needed? Can I stop it and not lose my backup?

I am using Windows 10 and my sister said my computer was freezing every time I click because my computer was too full so I needed to back up and delete some of the files (photos) from the computer to fix this problem. Is this related to the fact that the external drive is slow or ‘stuck’?

Please help!
Thanks for Technologically-Challenged, senior user

Here is the screen shot of my external drive

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!

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