Lost Partition upon cancelling File Content Compare

[CtrlF]

I've been cleaning and sorting last few days, and consolidating the files and folders onto an external hdd.
For good measure, I started a content compare after backing up a 250 gb download drive, because the source drive apparently had quite a few broken files. When I started the Compare process, the estimated completion time kept climbing to up to over 10 days . . . I knew something was wrong, so I cancelled the process. Even cancelling took about 5 minutes.

Everything started going wrong from that point. The source drive is still intact, but the destination backup drive (4tb HHD) lost partition records. But even more strange, when I plug in the hhd, it stalls the process, and sometimes it recognizes as e: drive, sometimes it doesn't. A few times, when it eventually responds to right click, the property shows that the drive is unformatted. I'm trying several different recovery tools. Any suggestion or help would be helpful. The reason for my posting here is this: At one point, the properties window labled the drive as a virtual disk. My additional question is, does FreeFileSync create a virtual drive overlay or something? If so, maybe my cancelling the compare process left the drive in the virtual drive state. If so, is there a way to recover it?

Thank you so much for any help.

p.s. I looked for an event log, but nothing there.

[xCSxXenon]

Nothing with FFS contributed to this, other than using the drive. It is probably failing and FFS was hammering it enough to send it over the edge. Check SMART data with Gsmartcontrol, if you can. Sounds like you may need professional service to get the data back though

[CtrlF]

Yes, I'm sure you're right. I was grasping at straws.

Per your suggestion, I ran gsmartcontrol, which took a bit of time, but worked. I'm not sure what to make of the output, so I'm hoping you can help more on how to fix it, including suggestions for a good software. Thank you in advance.

Below is the log.

WDC_WD40NMZW-11GX6S1_WD-WX51D3836YED_2022-03-21.txt

(36.02 KiB) Downloaded 87 times

[xCSxXenon]

That drive has 307 pending sector reallocations, is is failing. You can't fix it. Pending reallocations are a result of failed sectors and will eventually become reallocated to the set of sectors that the manufacturer sets aside. Usually no more than 50 sectors are set aside and reallocations aren't the worst thing to happen, but it is a sign to backup the data and decommission the drive. WD set aside 140 extra sectors for this, and the 307 is obviously not going to fit in there. Buy a replacement drive. If you can't see the data to transfer it, you are probably best off letting a professional do it. If you are comfortable, then I would first run chkdsk on the partition and then transfer the data off if it becomes accessible again. If the partition is actually lost according to Disk Management, TestDisk can search for it and write the partition table to get it back. Please remember, the drive will only get worse the more you use it, and doing these things, especially incorrectly, can cause data loss.

[therube]

That said, the lay person (myself included) runs a SMART test & it says:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

And they're like, ah, passed, so all is good.
All the while not knowing that something is lurking under the hood (between the sectors ;-)).

[xCSxXenon]

Yeah that overall result is only switched to FAILED loooong after the drive starts dying

[CtrlF]

I would first run chkdsk on the partition and then transfer the data off if it becomes accessible again. If the partition is actually lost according to Disk Management, TestDisk can search for it and write the partition table to get it back. Please remember, the drive will only get worse the more you use it, and doing these things, especially incorrectly, can cause data loss.

Thank you for the hard truth. I don't think there are any irreplaceable files on there, but I will try to recover it. I've ran chkdsk a couple of times and TestDisk a few times, without any success. Like therube said, I assumed the drive was fine, because SMART said so, because it's only been used for a couple of years, and because I assumed it would be more durable since easystore presumably was designed for backup purposes.

I've read a couple of blog posts showing how to manually relocate blocks, so i'll try that. Can you point me to some instruction using CLI to relocate the bad sectors?

Luckily, I only had about 400 to 500 mb of data on it. Moving forward, can you recommend a backup drive that I should be looking at as a replacement?

Thanks again.

[xCSxXenon]

You will probably not be successful in relocating sectors. You can look into 'ddrescue' if you are serious and there really isn't important data on it anyway. Drive quality is not nearly as important as data redundancy. All the manufacturers have different series that provide different endurance ratings. Faster, longer life, more reliability are all directly related to cost. I wouldn't buy a WD Green drive to store the only copy of my data. I also wouldn't buy a Seagate Exos, top of the line server drive, and store the only copy of my data on that either.