USB Drive Recovery Advice

[MonadicEndofunctor]

Howdy, I purchased a Kingston 2TB external USB-C drive (Model KNGXS20002TB) about 2 years ago and last month it seemed to start failing, causing windows explorer, Disk Management, Event Viewer, Terminal, etc. to completely lock up until the drive was removed.

Running it through SpinRite, it quickly halted on some bad sectors about 0.0104% into the drive, requiring me to power-cycle (unplug and restart SpinRite) the drive.

I’m currently running level 2 past the faulty sectors and I had bitlocker enabled, is the data likely hosed? It wouldn’t be a huge issue as I’m pretty sure I have it backed up elsewhere.

 

[AlanD]

It depends on whether the faulty sectors contained any data. If they were empty or not in use, the rest of the data should be OK. The easiest way to test is to wait until SR has finished, and then try reading the drive again.

 

[PHolder]

causing windows explorer, Disk Management, Event Viewer, Terminal, etc. to completely lock up until the drive was removed.

This seems unusual behaviour if you're not booting the OS from the device. Event Viewer in particular should not be accessing an external device.

 

[AlanD]

If you have Task Manager running, you might see System Interrupts running at 100% busy, they pre-empting anything else.

 

[MonadicEndofunctor]

After letting SpinRite finish, I tried decrypting the drive using manage-bde which took about two days and I did get everything back, except for some game assets from Battlefield 3. Thanks for the advice, and another curious detail was that whenever I had the drive plugged in and booted into the BIOS, it would also lock up.