@Codingale Go-to is ddrescue to image and (recover what you can fro mthe image with testdisk/photorec

@Bob oh I forgot about this, more or less @Bob I had a failure where my HDD disappeared from windows, after it got very hot (still does) and wouldn't show up in BIOS 50% of the time. I removed the connector and cleaned the contacts and it showed up however the CrystalDisk info tool I'm pretty sure says it's on the verge of failing.

@Codingale It's dead. Recover what you can (ddrescue) and chuck it in a bin.

Reallocated sectors are bad. Uncorrectable sectors are bad. Pending sectors means it needs to reallocate even more but probably can't find any spare sectors. It's very dead.

The thing is, it's working now and I've been recovering about 500 GB worth of video files.

Yeah I'm replacing it but somehow it's working at the moment.

I assume it's the power on time combined with a mass data writing over time.

Reason ddrescue is recommended is it's smart enough to skip over unreadable sections and pull large blocks of readable data before going back and slicing down the unreadable section as small as possible.

Basically it's a race against time, because this kind of drive issue tends to spread.

Yeah, it's had it's run. I did get it for free. I can't upload those many videos easily to anywhere but YouTube and even then I can only do 99 per day.

I'm hoping it lasts until April 7th which is when I estimated it'd finish.