Always Keep in mind that if you’re in a data loss situation and your hard drive has become corrupted, you should stop using the drive immediately. If you continue to run the external HDD, it may cause new data to overwrite your lost files and significantly reduce your chances of retrieval. Causes of Corrupted External Hard Drive Before you repair an external hard drive or recover files from it, you must understand what causes a hard drive to become corrupted. You can experience hard drive failure at any given moment. While these reasons may be different, they can cause permanent data loss. Thus, you must identify the common reasons for hard drive failure to determine the best approach to recover a corrupted external hard drive. Software Failure – A healthy, well-functioning hard drive can become corrupted due to software bugs. In some cases, these bugs may be limited to a few corrupted files. However, you could end up in a sticky situation if the entire file system on your external HDD becomes corrupt, and it can result in permanent data loss. Bad Sectors or blocks – Sometimes, your drive reports a number of bad sectors on your drive. These are areas on an external HDD that become unusable due to long-term use and can make the drive unreadable. Bad sectors or blocks also act as a warning that you may need to replace or format your drive immediately. Read/Write Issues – A traditional hard drive works using a spinning disk mechanism to write data to the drive. This mechanism relies on the rotating platters attached to an arm which facilitate the read/write action. Usual wear and tear or something interrupting this process can result in read/write issues and even cause the hard drive to become corrupted. Virus Attacks – Some virus or malware infections from unknown sources are programmed to corrupt file systems and cause severe data loss. Reliable antivirus software should help prevent such an attack and maintain caution. Improper Drive Usage – Any technology, if misused, will become prone to damage. If a hard drive is not ejected correctly or doesn’t have suitable operating conditions – for instance, excessive heat or unexpected power supply interruptions – the hard drive’s lifespan can reduce significantly and becomes prone to corruption. How to Recover Data from the Corrupted External Hard Drive When your storage device suddenly stops working, the most important thing that crosses our mind is how to recover data or files from it. Below, you’ll find following methods to fix this issue. Method 1. Recover Data with Another USB Cable or in Different PC / Computer If you are not sure whether the device has an issue, you can connect it to a different USB port or even a different PC to see whether it gets detected or not. If the drive can be read, then you can use your data on the external hard drive. In case the hard drive cannot be detected on the other computer, check its status in Windows Disk Management. Then, try to change the drive letter and path to make it show up. Step 1. Right-click on This PC and select Manage. Under the Storage section, click Disk Management. Or, use an alternative way to open Disk Management in Windows 10/8.1/8/7: Press Windows + R keys, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run box, and hit Enter. Step 2. Right-click on the SSD partition and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”. Step 3. Among the Add, Change, and Remove options, click the “Change” button, and then select a drive letter from the list. Click “OK” to assign a new drive letter to the problematic hard drive. How to Restore Corrupted System Files from the External Hard Drive Missing or corrupted system files are sometimes the reason for a hard drive with unusual symptoms. This usually occurs when there is a problem during the file save process. So, when your hard drive seems to be damaged and you cannot open it, you might need to repair the crashed system files first. Open Start, type cmd, and hit Enter to launch a Command Prompt Window. Type chkdsk g:/f (if the external hard drive is drive g) and press Enter. Type sfc /scannow and hit Enter. When the repair process has finished, you’ll see a “Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations” message if no corruption has been found. Otherwise, it’ll fix it automatically. How to Repair Corrupted External Hard Drive In this part, we’ll show you following methods to format a corrupted external hard drive and get it back to normal condition again. Before you proceed, it’s necessary to know the kind of hard drive problems that you can use the disk formatting method to resolve. Theoretically speaking, disk formatting should be done with caution because it erases data and removes installed programs. It’s extremely useful, though. Disk formatting is the configuring process of data storage media for initial, so it can solve most common hard drive issues like “Disk is not fomatted, do you want to format it now?”, or hard drive is not showing up and displaying itself as RAW. Moreover, it can scan and repair bad sectors, and sometimes remove sophisticated viruses. Method 2. Repair Corrupted External Hard Drive with Manual Repair Sometimes data storage devices, HDDs, memory cards, or USB sticks are not recognized by the operating system, making it impossible to access professional or personal data. EaseUS provides a 100% working solution – a manual disk repair service. You can repair your external hard drives with the help of experts. Consult with data recovery experts for one-on-one manual recovery service in your City. Repair corrupted RAID structure, unbootable Windows OS, and corrupted virtual disk file Recover/repair lost partition and re-partitioned drive Unformat hard drive and repair raw drive (BitLocker encrypted drive) Fix disks that become GPT protected partitions Method 3. Quickly Fix Corrupted External Hard Drive by Formatting It Step 1. Connect the problematic external hard drive to the PC. Step 2. Right-click the device and select Format. Step 3. Set a new file system, NTFS or FAT, for
