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External disk not accessible (possibly related blue screens)
Hi all,
I have a fairly new external drive which can't be accessed anymore. It's one of my backups in a USB enclosure, where I store my Macrium Reflect images. Bulk disk + enclosure were bought separately.
Under Windows Explorer, I have an error message which says : F:\is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
The custom label I had saved for it is replaced by "Local Disk".
Under Windows Disk Management, the disk shows up as Basic, Online, RAW (instead of NTFS, which it was, originally), Healthy (Primary partition).
Under Hard Disk Sentinel, the disk shows with a health status of 100 %, "Problematic or weak sectors were not found, and there are no spin up or data transfer errors. No actions needed."
However, Hard Disk Sentinel cannot read the amount of used / free space. The so-called Short Self-Test (1 mn) was successful, the Extended Self-Test (166 mn) got "aborted by host" after 1 h +.
Possibly related : I have been experiencing some unusual blue screens those past months. Especially, Macrium Reflect full images seem to abort often to blue screens (incrementals don't).
I bought a printer recently which worked for a while, then often brought blue screens. Uninstalling the driver and software slowed down the occurence of blue screens. However, I cannot install the driver anymore.
I tested separately my system drive a while ago with Hard Disk Sentinel, and there seems to be a persistent weak / bad sector at the beginning of the disk which aborts the software's tests in an unusual way. I haven't been able to diagnose or repair that issue, and I'm also wondering whether the present corruption of the external disk might be related.
The files on that disk are not vital. It's my backup n°2 and I have a spare. But I'd like to try and repair the disk, understand the issue and prevent it from re-happening. Thank you !