Hello. I hope this is the right forum. I have a Western Digital 1TB USB drive and a few weeks ago it began showing strange symbols instead of the correct file names. i tried some new firmware, plugged and unplugged the drive from the computer many times and eventually it stopped with the symbols. But it began showing a lot of my files as 32k in size. Like half the files on the almost filled up drive show up like this. Even the files which show up at reasonable sizes (they are mostly FLAC music files so let's say a 19.5 MB file) do not work when I try to access them. They look ok but are apparently screwed up. If I try to open the FLAC files, for instance, the software I use starts opening the file but tells me the file ended prematurely midstream or something. I can't use a recovery program I don't think which helps find deleted files because all the files are there. They just don't work. Is there any hope? I called Western Digital (this thing is still under warranty) and they offered me no suggestions but to give up on the files. Is there really nothing I can try? No way to try to get the files back to normal? Thank you for any input.
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External USB Drive Misbehavior...
- Thread starter louis chen
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Sounds like the partition may be corrupted, or the drive might be failing. You don't have a backup, huh?
i only bought it like three or four months ago. i was cheap and went the USB route and it is so nauseatingly slow i dumped a lot of files onto it around when i got it and never wanted to use it again and just wanted to get the files off of it now that i have a newer (internal) drive large enough to hold all the files.
While "slow" is pretty subjective, it can be a sign of a faulty hard drive. The good news is that WD has a 5-year warranty (or at least 3-year) on all of their products, so you should be able to get it replaced.