What Happened With My External?

This morning I was checking couple of pictures in my 6 years old 1 TB Seagate HDD. Files were loading really slow and windows explorer hang generating thumbnails. So I disconnected and reconnected the USB and it show free space 470 GB (It was 69 GB earlier). I checked the folders, files were still intact. Filemenu tools context menu showeed directory structures and calculated the free space is 69 GB. Explorer was still reporting 470 GB.

So I checked my folders. I have some pretty big videos, digital recordings, a lot family pictures (those are backed up), all sorted nicely in different folders and defragmented. I found all of my files after a certain directory are corrupt. I couldnt open them. I checked some files before them, and they were intact. Directory structures are same, as far I can tell. I connected to two different USB ports, same.

So I used disk check (auto fix file system errors) and after a minute it was finished. It was still showing wrong free space, I disconnected and next time it showed 69 GB free space. But the files were still corrupt. So I have set disk check again checking both options to fix bad sectors. But after two hours, its showing 121 files processed and the gui looks like 10%. Does someone know if I can check the status % and the files it processed anywhere?

Also we have frequent power cuts in my locality and my UPS wont run more than 10-15 min. I googled the time it might take to fully process the HDD and it seems it will take anywhere between hours to days. I have around 2,00,000 files. about 15000 of them are pictures, about a hundred videos totalling 600 GB, some music and a lot saved webpages, including very small .js and such files. So does anyone know how long this might take? Or if a power cut happens and my external is shut down (connected directly to the outlet) what kind of problems might occur?

This HDD is around 6 years old and it has a lot bad blocks, windows eventviewer shows frequently. HDDScan shows Reallocation Sector Count value as 027. I know this might be the hdd is dying but I still cant figure out why the free space problem should occur? I have attached the log file from HDDScan.

 

Okay, after 10 hours windows finished disk checking and made some corrections, but still I am seeing the files corrupt. Any advice?

 

Okay, there's an update. after that day I shut my computer and external both down and next day when I started, it worked flawless. I could view everything perfectly. I have copied most files to my other disks and I am still moving. Windows said it fixed about 2500 bad sectors. I plan to run seagate's long generic test and try to fix it after I moved all my files. So does anyone have any idea why the wrong size was being shown and the disk worked next day but not that day?

 

You may want to have a look at HDD Renerator - it does its best to actually repair damaged sectors.

Once repaired, and you have copied all the data from the drive it is probably best to ditch the drive if there were a lot of errors on it.

 

I have spinrite, I will give it a try after I am done copying. But that might take days.

 

So you really lost most of the media files?
Damn, i gotta buy a new backup HDD just in case.

 

A backup a day keeps data recovery away..(!)

A practical observation. Repaired sectors by spinrite and hdd regenerator are likely to be corrupt. In theory they shouldn't, but in practice they almost always are. You'll need to note what sectors are repaired and what files used those sectors and then verify the integrity of the file.

These programs work well in power-outage and brownout situations. But if the drive is failing because of marginal components, fuhhgetaboutit.