About maybe two years ago I lost a great deal of data on a 500GB My book Western Digital external HDD. Lately I've been broke and hurting for space and I'm wondering if it is possible to salvage this HDD. It still runs I can still access it I just don't trust it with holding any new data lol. I wanted to erase everything start clean but is that really going to make a difference? For extra detail basically when I would restart my computer the chkdsk would automatically start and once that was over and I arrived in windows either a file would end up missing or be corrupted.
Windows starting and running checkdisk everytime is quite common if the drive is flagged as dirty. You can still use a disk like that. The problem may be with the bridge that connects your (sata I assume) hard drive inside the case to the usb port on the case. You could try taking it out of the case and putting it in a new enclosure, which are cheap. However, the problem may be with the hard disk itself, in which case you should chuck it. Test it by formatting it with a full (not quick) format and then copying a large amount of data, say 100GB or so to and from it a few times and check it you get errors such as "Windows Write Delay Error". Try to copy lots of both small and large files. If you are confident with it after testing then it might be fine for use although don't blame me if it goes wrong again. The other thing is, external drives are pretty cheap right now, 1TB or more for around £40 so it might not be worth messing about with it at all.
or run the hard disk regenerator on the hiren boot disk this often fixes drives that haven't actually died, and just got themselves confused
