Hey everyone, I made a mistake and filled my 5TB HDD almost to the max, and now my computer isn't recognizing it properly. File Explorer just freezes whenever I plug it in. I really don't think it's just failing randomly – I feel like I messed something up by filling it so much. I've got a ton of 4K movies on there, and I want to try and recover them if possible!
2 Answers
It's unlikely that filling your drive caused any damage. It could be unrelated, like age or wear. By the way, is your drive internal or external? Those external drives can be more sensitive to bumps and drops. Try checking if it shows up in disk management when plugged in and consider running CHKDSK to see if that helps. If you can't access it on Windows, you might want to boot from a Linux USB and see if that works better.
Filling a hard drive isn’t something that damages it, so don't worry! It might not be the hard drive itself that's failing; there could be another issue. Just keep it away from the oven, and you should be good to go!
It’s an external drive I got in 2018-19. I finally got it to recognize, but CrystalDisk says there’s a current pending sector count issue. I’m looking up how to save my files now.