External Hd Failing?

Good morning/afternoon/evening, folks...

Hopefully someone can help!

Just this past few days I have belatedly decided to upload the photos/images from my Western Digital external hard drive (which I have been using as primary storage without incident) to cloud storage as a secondary back-up, and there the 'fun' began...
I have managed to copy most of the content form the external hard drive to my pc prior to uploading to cloud storage but, I have suddenly, without any prior indication of a problem with the drive, started receiving the following messages when trying to access a certain number of folders:
'E:\*filename* is not accesible - The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error'

and

'E:\*filename* is not accesible - The semaphore timeout period has expired'

Also in the files I could access there was often corrupted images which I could no longer open and which trying to do so would cause the whole thing to freeze up until I managed to delete them after restarting the external hard drive!

If the hard drive is indeed failing is there anything I can do to recover any of the files still on it?

My PC is a Dell Optiplex 380 running Win 10 64 bit

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated...

-Dazz

 

If the external drive is plugged and you right click on that drive > properties > tools > error checking, you can check the drive. You can also use a tool from the website of the external drive manufacturer, or you can use any of these free tools:
https://www.lifewire.com/free-hard-drive-testing-programs-2626183

 

I downloaded Western Digital's Data Lifeguard and ran a full test, the test failed half way through because of 'too many bad sectors', does this mean the HD is essentially trashed and any data recovery is now impossible?

-Dazz

 

over the last 17 years, i have used many many external drives.
my experience is that when the external drive stops working,
the vast majority of the times, it is the external case that is failing, not the hard drive.
just take the hard drive out of the case, and hook it to the computer using a USB to IDE/SATA adapter.
i'm to the point now where i don't buy external drives because of this. i'll buy bare hard drives
and use either a toaster or an adapter to connect it to my computer.

just last month, i had an old external drive that i tried to use. diagnostics reported every sector as bad.
i took it out of the case, hooked it up with a usb adapter, and every thing was fine, all the files were there,
and i had no issues using the bare drive with the usb adapter. go figure.

good luck with it.

 

Thanks for the advice, harmless, my external HD has it's own power supply, if I remove the drive from the case will it then receive it's power via the USB adapter?

-Dazz

 

every USB to IDE/SATA adapter, that i have used, plug into an electrical outlet ( they have their own power brick )
so supplying power to the hard drive is never a problem.
good luck with it.

 

Thanks...

 

Would an external enclosure/caddy work as well?

-Dazz

 

The external enclosures also have a power supply. The USB port doesn't supply enough power.

The advantage of an adapter is that you don't have to keep opening up a case to insert and remove different hard drives, or optical drives. (I have an old CD burner in one of my enclosures).

 

OK, thanks for the help, folks...

-Dazz