My friend dropped his WD external drive with all his kid's videos through the years and when trying to access the files, the green bar in Windows Explorer loads real slow reading the drive. I was able to transfer 80% of the videos to my PC. The other 20% would give you an error "Can't read from the source file or disk" when trying to transfer". If these files are corrupted is there suggestions to recover them?
is the hard drive clicking when you try to access it? If so, you might have a read head that is sticking while moving across the platters inside a hard drive. Believe it or not I have been able to unstick a read head temporarily and recover data by taking the hard drive out, taking a small ball peen hammer, and giving it a good solid tap right in the middle of the drive (obviously not on the PCB side). Bear in mind, this sort of percussive maintenance would be a last ditch effort and stands a very good chance of ruining the hard drive completely.
This is usually caused by a bad board- there are services on ebay that will create a new one for you for under $100.
Over the weekend, when plugging in the WD hard drive everything appeared to work fine except for the slow loading the files in the drive. However, when trying to copy over the 88 vids to my PC .. 70 of them copied over without any issue, the other 18 would turn into a red bar and noted "can't read from source file or disk". I would have to select skip to transfer the next video until the next corrupt one and get the same message. This morning I tried to plug in the hard drive again and see if I could recovery these 18 corrupt videos but, the WD Hard drive does not appear in My Computer. I tried plugging to several USB ports but same issue. I do however see it at the bottom right hand corner when you select to eject the hard drive. Went into Disk Management and do not see the drive there either. Is the HD dead?
