Interrupted hard drive during copy, is it dead now?

[jent]

I was copying files to my USB 3.0 external hard drive (from a USB 2.0 Mac) and noticed it was going extremely slowly. After about a day I clicked the Cancel button and after about half a day of it not cancelling, I just manually relaunched the Finder and restarted the computer. The disk no longer mounts, but it does show up in Disk Utility as a grayed-out drive.

I'm searching online and am finding lots of articles about how to reinstall the OS, but I simply want the external drive to work again. I don't care about the lost data. Sadly, none of the numerous articles I've found about mounting or unmounting the HDD in Terminal work, nor do Terminal commands to erase and format the disk. I tried connecting it to my Mac and booting up in Windows 7 but it said I didn't have permissions to access/erase the drive.

If I try to erase the disk in Terminal, I get "Error: -69877: Couldn't open device." If I try to erase it in Disk Utility, I get "Unmounting disk. Couldn't open disk. : (-69879). Operation failed…" Running Disk First Aid also fails with error -69845. Sometimes during a Disk Utility erase attempt I get "Could not mount “DRIVENAME”. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.)"

Any idea if it's possible to get this external drive working again? Thank you!

 

[Longkeg]

Without knowing the make, model, size and age of the drive I’m just guessing it’s dead. Not necessarily anything you did; could have just been its time.

 

[jent]

Without knowing the make, model, size and age of the drive I’m just guessing it’s dead. Not necessarily anything you did; could have just been its time.

For reference, it's a USB 3.0 WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive (2.5" HDD). Rarely used and two and a half years old. I assume it died because of me force-relaunching Finder during the copy cancelation but I'm surprised the drive could be fully dead as opposed to just losing the data.

 

[Longkeg]

For reference, it's a USB 3.0 WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive (2.5" HDD). Rarely used and two and a half years old. I assume it died because of me force-relaunching Finder during the copy cancelation but I'm surprised the drive could be fully dead as opposed to just losing the data.

The forced relaunch may have corrupted the data but it shouldn’t have irreparably damaged the drive. The “Rarely used” may have something to do with it. HDDs have moving parts that can fail. Use it too much and the moving parts wear out. Don’t use it enough and they can freeze up. Hence the big move to SSDs these days. One last thing You could try is to connect it to another computer and see if you get the same errors. If the result is the same I think you have a dead drive.

 

[jent]

The forced relaunch may have corrupted the data but it shouldn’t have irreparably damaged the drive. The “Rarely used” may have something to do with it. HDDs have moving parts that can fail. Use it too much and the moving parts wear out. Don’t use it enough and they can freeze up. Hence the big move to SSDs these days. One last thing You could try is to connect it to another computer and see if you get the same errors. If the result is the same I think you have a dead drive.

Thanks for the response. It put up well with a big file transfer some six months ago but sadly it's out of warranty now so I hope it can magically be revived. Oh well!

 

[OLDCODGER]

Thanks for the response. It put up well with a big file transfer some six months ago but sadly it's out of warranty now so I hope it can magically be revived. Oh well!

As Longkeg suggested, try another Mac, since your old USB 2.0 may be the one dying/dead (which caused the drive to slow right down).

 

[jent]

As Longkeg suggested, try another Mac, since your old USB 2.0 may be the one dying/dead (which caused the drive to slow right down).

I've tried on my 2020 MacBook Pro using a USB-C to USB-A adapter and my super old Mac straight into the USB 2.0 port yet sadly it's the same result on both.

 

[OLDCODGER]

I've tried on my 2020 MacBook Pro using a USB-C to USB-A adapter and my super old Mac straight into the USB 2.0 port yet sadly it's the same result on both.

Ah, well, that’s it then - dead drive, I’m afraid.

 

[jent]

Ah, well, that’s it then - dead drive, I’m afraid.

It is what it is. Thanks!

 

[ght56]

For reference, it's a USB 3.0 WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive (2.5" HDD). Rarely used and two and a half years old. I assume it died because of me force-relaunching Finder during the copy cancelation but I'm surprised the drive could be fully dead as opposed to just losing the data.

Based on what you have described, my guess is also that the drive has suffered mechanical failure. These gigantic 2.5-inch drives seem to have a tendency to fail pretty frequently--possibly due to them having many platters and there being more things that could go wrong? There is a program you can used called DriveDX, which pulls drive metrics and can in some cases confirm the drive is dead. It is a paid app but has a free trial, and (if it can read the drive) it could confirm the drive has failed.

 

[Nermal]

I've come to the same conclusion. I think the drive failed during the copy, which is why you weren't able to cancel it. The cancellation itself didn't cause the issue.

 

[chscag]

You stated the drive is 2 ½ years old. I thought WD warranted their drives for 3 years? You might want to check that just in case the drive is still covered. You may be able to get a RMA and a replacement from WD.

 

[jent]

You stated the drive is 2 ½ years old. I thought WD warranted their drives for 3 years? You might want to check that just in case the drive is still covered. You may be able to get a RMA and a replacement from WD.

According to the Amazon product page I bought it from, it comes with a two-year warranty. I visited the WD website and inputted the serial number and it mentioned a warranty expiration date approximately nine months from my purchase date (maybe that's two years from the purchase date of the Amazon seller?). Regardless, I doubt they'd replace that based on the two-plus years since my purchase.

 

[jent]

Based on what you have described, my guess is also that the drive has suffered mechanical failure. These gigantic 2.5-inch drives seem to have a tendency to fail pretty frequently--possibly due to them having many platters and there being more things that could go wrong? There is a program you can used called DriveDX, which pulls drive metrics and can in some cases confirm the drive is dead. It is a paid app but has a free trial, and (if it can read the drive) it could confirm the drive has failed.

Thanks for the info! The drive passes the four health indicators of DriveDx and I'm currently running a self-test to see how it goes.

 

[q64ceo]

Do you have a copy of Windows?

I suggest you try Diskpart

It is an incredibly powerful disk partition tool built into Windows as a command line app. I can walk you thru the steps needed to clean a disk the proper way.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Sadly age has nothing to do with longevity. I had a Seagate drive die within 2 months. It was one of their first 3TB bare drive models. I lost some projects that were on that drive. Seagate followed through with a 'new' drive, but I never trusted it.

I had another external Seagate drive that, unbeknownst to me had their infamous 3TB drive in it, and it died literally days after their generous warranty period. Thanks, Seagate. I also found out that I had installed one of those same drives in my Mac Pro, and had to go purchase a WesternDigital external drive to back it up. I'm just waiting for it to fail.

Disk Firstaid was a program that allowed for recovery of data on failed hard drives. I've used it a few times. DriveSavers is a company that can usually recover data from slammed drives. It depends on how much money you want to spend, and how valuable the data is/was, but since it was a copy operation you probably don't want to waste the money.

Drives die. It sucks. The only way to guard against such failures is to use a drive array setup with RAID redundancy. There are many out there...

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Do you have a copy of Windows?

I suggest you try Diskpart

It is an incredibly powerful disk partition tool built into Windows as a command line app. I can walk you thru the steps needed to clean a disk the proper way.

Killdisk, or the low level format utility from WesternDigital. Their support utility would see if the drive is even accessible, and if it is, run their tests, and then zero it out to clean it. You don't usually need to run the whole zero process, but let it run for a few minutes to make sure that the areas with partition tables are wiped. Sometimes good drives won't mount because the drive just 'looks bad' because of corrupted data in the early part of the drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Something to try, no promises.

Go to this page:

WD Software

List of all WD firmware and software available for download.

support.wdc.com

Scroll down to "software for Mac".

Click the "+" sign adjacent to "WD Drive Utilities for Mac" and download the application.

See if it will run and recognize the drive you have.

If it does, see if it will erase the drive so you can start over.

 

[jent]

Hi everyone, I just want to give a strange update that I ran DriveDx open overnight, running the free "short self-test" feature that is estimated to take two minutes but took so long I just went to sleep. It completed without error (even though the drive didn't mount and couldn't be erased).

When I woke up, the drive was mounted on my computer as if everything were normal. I obviously don't trust it anymore but at least I can experiment with the drive to see if it lets me move data from one Mac to another while I wait for a replacement order to ship out to me.

I'm currently running Disk Utility's First Aid on the mounted drive and it's been on "Checking file system hierarchy" for about fifteen minutes. Whether the drive is good or bad, I've never known First Aid to take more than about two minutes total.

Do you have a copy of Windows?

I suggest you try Diskpart

It is an incredibly powerful disk partition tool built into Windows as a command line app. I can walk you thru the steps needed to clean a disk the proper way.

I'll be happy to try this since I have Windows 7 on an old Mac.

Killdisk, or the low level format utility from WesternDigital. Their support utility would see if the drive is even accessible, and if it is, run their tests, and then zero it out to clean it. You don't usually need to run the whole zero process, but let it run for a few minutes to make sure that the areas with partition tables are wiped. Sometimes good drives won't mount because the drive just 'looks bad' because of corrupted data in the early part of the drive.

Is that available on Mac? I don't see it on the list of software available on the WD website that Fishrrman posted (see the quoted text below).

OP:

Something to try, no promises.

Go to this page:

WD Software

List of all WD firmware and software available for download.

support.wdc.com

Scroll down to "software for Mac".

Click the "+" sign adjacent to "WD Drive Utilities for Mac" and download the application.

See if it will run and recognize the drive you have.

If it does, see if it will erase the drive so you can start over.

I'll also look into this.

 

[chown33]

Hi everyone, I just want to give a strange update that I ran DriveDx open overnight, running the free "short self-test" feature that is estimated to take two minutes but took so long I just went to sleep. It completed without error (even though the drive didn't mount and couldn't be erased).

When I woke up, the drive was mounted on my computer as if everything were normal. I obviously don't trust it anymore but at least I can experiment with the drive to see if it lets me move data from one Mac to another while I wait for a replacement order to ship out to me.

I'm currently running Disk Utility's First Aid on the mounted drive and it's been on "Checking file system hierarchy" for about fifteen minutes. Whether the drive is good or bad, I've never known First Aid to take more than about two minutes total.

If DriveDx took a very long time, and First Aid is also taking a very long time, then the data may be unrecoverable in any practical sense. That is, it might take months or years to read the desired data.

One way that drives fail is an inability to reliably read data from the spinning platter, so it can then be sent to the computer requesting the data. First, recognize that the data is stored in blocks, which are basically numbered. So the computer requests "read block 1983" and the disk reads the block, checks it, then sends it to the computer.

Normally, reading a block takes a small amount of time. If the drive's data integrity check fails, however, the drive's first line of defense is to re-read the block. If that fails, it might retry multiple times, possibly also moving the disk heads to a different track, then moving back to the track where the block resides. It can do all these things multiple times before it gives up. Or it might succeed after 10 moves to a different track, then a move back.

Let's say it succeeds after multiple retries and multiple head moves. Well, that one block probably took 50 or 100 times longer than usual. Now imagine that every block requested by the computer goes through the same thing: multiple integrity check failures, multiple retries, multiple head moves. It's going to take 50 or 100 times longer to read anything, including reading directories to locate the files.

Then what if my estimate of 100 times longer is optimistic, and it really takes 500 or 1000 times longer?

And that's not even considering that some blocks may be completely unreadable, in which case you can't get that data off the drive, no matter what.

Then you have to ask yourself whether you'd trust a drive to store your data, after it failed so spectacularly.

 

[jent]

If DriveDx took a very long time, and First Aid is also taking a very long time, then the data may be unrecoverable in any practical sense. That is, it might take months or years to read the desired data.

One way that drives fail is an inability to reliably read data from the spinning platter, so it can then be sent to the computer requesting the data. First, recognize that the data is stored in blocks, which are basically numbered. So the computer requests "read block 1983" and the disk reads the block, checks it, then sends it to the computer.

Normally, reading a block takes a small amount of time. If the drive's data integrity check fails, however, the drive's first line of defense is to re-read the block. If that fails, it might retry multiple times, possibly also moving the disk heads to a different track, then moving back to the track where the block resides. It can do all these things multiple times before it gives up. Or it might succeed after 10 moves to a different track, then a move back.

Let's say it succeeds after multiple retries and multiple head moves. Well, that one block probably took 50 or 100 times longer than usual. Now imagine that every block requested by the computer goes through the same thing: multiple integrity check failures, multiple retries, multiple head moves. It's going to take 50 or 100 times longer to read anything, including directories just to locate the files.

Then what if my estimate of 100 times longer is optimistic, and it really takes 500 or 1000 times longer?

And that's not even considering that some blocks may be completely unreadable, in which case you can't get that data off the drive, no matter what.

Although I don't understand the deep technical aspects, that explanation makes sense! Based on the information on hand, would a scenario like the one you're laying out mean an erase and reformatting of the drive would bring it back to normal, or does this imply hardware failure that won't go away? If the latter, is there such a thing where a drive can be taught to recognize and ignore bad blocks?

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

What you could do with the drive now:
1. Get ANOTHER 1tb drive.
2. Use CarbonCopyCloner (or SuperDuper) to clone the contents of the WD drive to the new drive. Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and use for 30 days.
3. Erase the WD drive and check it again using disk utility (read on).

What follows will ERASE everything on the drive:
a. Erase with disk utility. Choose Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format.
b. Use disk utility's "first aid" feature to check the drive. Do you get "a good report"?
c. If you DO get a good report, REPEAT the first aid check FIVE MORE TIMES in succession.
d. Do you get a good report each and every time?
e. If so, then continue to use the drive. Either use it for "non-critical" storage (stuff you can afford to lose), OR, back it up to another drive regularly using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Either will create an exact copy on the backup drive (non of that time machine nonsense).

 

[chown33]

It's possible that an erase might bring it back to normal, but I wouldn't put any bets on it. Even if it does, would you really trust it again, since it might go into the weeds again at any moment. At best, it might be an interesting experiment to try, but I wouldn't rely on it.

Disk drives usually ignore bad blocks already. They're "over-provisioned", meaning there's unused blocks beyond what the disk itself reports as its size (block count). The drive will bring those spare blocks into use when it detects a bad block (integrity check failure), if the data can be reliably read. The point at which a drive decides to use a spare block depends on the mfgr, what the drive firmware does, what the mfgr's over-provisioning has available, and so on. The OS is also capable of ignoring bad blocks, which is another layer on top of what the drive might do.

At this point, you should probably just assume there are more bad blocks than any available spares that might be brought in. If only 1 out of 50 blocks is good, and even those are unreliable (could fail at any time), what is gained by storing data on it?

 

[jent]

OP:

What you could do with the drive now:
1. Get ANOTHER 1tb drive.
2. Use CarbonCopyCloner (or SuperDuper) to clone the contents of the WD drive to the new drive. Both CCC and SD are FREE to download and use for 30 days.
3. Erase the WD drive and check it again using disk utility (read on).

What follows will ERASE everything on the drive:
a. Erase with disk utility. Choose Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format.
b. Use disk utility's "first aid" feature to check the drive. Do you get "a good report"?
c. If you DO get a good report, REPEAT the first aid check FIVE MORE TIMES in succession.
d. Do you get a good report each and every time?
e. If so, then continue to use the drive. Either use it for "non-critical" storage (stuff you can afford to lose), OR, back it up to another drive regularly using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Either will create an exact copy on the backup drive (non of that time machine nonsense).

It's possible that an erase might bring it back to normal, but I wouldn't put any bets on it. Even if it does, would you really trust it again, since it might go into the weeds again at any moment. At best, it might be an interesting experiment to try, but I wouldn't rely on it.

Disk drives usually ignore bad blocks already. They're "over-provisioned", meaning there's unused blocks beyond what the disk itself reports as its size (block count). The drive will bring those spare blocks into use when it detects a bad block (integrity check failure), if the data can be reliably read. The point at which a drive decides to use a spare block depends on the mfgr, what the drive firmware does, what the mfgr's over-provisioning has available, and so on. The OS is also capable of ignoring bad blocks, which is another layer on top of what the drive might do.

At this point, you should probably just assume there are more bad blocks than any available spares that might be brought in. If only 1 out of 50 blocks is good, and even those are unreliable (could fail at any time), what is gained by storing data on it?

Great points made by both of you. Happy to erase and use for non-critical purposes like moving files between computers.

I should add that after about an hour and a half or so the First Aid finished and said everything looked good. I just copied a 2GB video file to the drive over USB 3.0 and it took about 30 seconds. I guess with that I'll hook it back up to the old Mac over USB 2.0 and see if I can copy the files over to attempt to achieve what I was originally hoping to do by copying files from my old Mac to my new one. If the external drive dies, nothing will be lost.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

It is possible, but very incredibly unlikely to corrupt a drive bad enough that it won't mount, or be seen, and low level formatted by the number of utilities that are out there. I've done most of my low level formatting using Windows. For the longest time, there were no utilities that provided that function from the major companies. Possibly a limitation caused by macOS trying to keep us away from the lower levels of the hardware. *shrug*

Kill Disk was a Q&D utility that ran on Windows and DOS to low level any drive. It was agnostic, and would 'kill' anything. I still find myself using Windows and the drive manufacturer utilities to diagnose drive issues.