Overfilled my external HDD - now can't access it

Hi everyone

Spent half of yesterday working in my external HDD creating file images etc, suddenly the drive went into non stop whirring and grinding mode and the PC froze, I rebooted and now I can't access it.

My computer still recognizes it as E drive but if I try to open it or explore it then Windows Explorer hangs after a minute of trying to access the drive.

Stellar Phoenix can see and recover the files on there, so data recovery isn't actually looking like a problem.

The problem looks to be pretty obvious, it's telling me that I have 86 MB free space (on a 250 GB HDD). 207 GB of useful files and the rest is deleted or lost files.

Disk Cleanup can't access the drive either. There's plenty of files I don't mind deleting, if I can just get Windows to let me in ...

Can anyone advise?

 

Sounds like your hard drive is on it's way out. I would back up anything important as soon as possible. Grinding noise on a HD is never a good sign.

E