BleepingComputer.com: Western Digital External HD

I recently recieved an external hard drive from a friend with some files on it. When I brought the drive home it was running slowly but loading everything properly. When I plugged it in tonight I immediately noticed that it had brought my entire computer to a near standstill, freezing everything for nearly 7 minutes. Once it finally loaded half of the files were missing, but shows under "My Computer" that the memory is still being used. I tried running a diagnostic scan from Western Digitals website and during the extended scan it reached a sector than the estimated time left went up to some absurd number (300 and something hours) It won't allow me to back up any data on it, usually doing the same thing and I can't open any folders on it, I can only see them. I'd like to get someone else opinion on this.

Thanks in advance

This post has been edited by Tiltedecho: 04 April 2009 - 04:50 AM

Did you friend give this to you or loan it to you? Were you going to use the files already on it or were you going to use it for back up?
I ask these questions because I'd be darned if I would attach an unfamiliar device to my computer without scanning it first
It might be worth running Flash Drive Disinfector:
-------------------------

Flash_Disinfector.exe by sUBs and save it to your desktop.

• Double-click Flash_Disinfector.exe to run it and follow any prompts that may appear.
  
• The utility may ask you to insert your flash drive and/or other removable drives. Please do so and allow the utility to clean up those drives as well.
  
• Hold down the Shift key when inserting the drive until Windows detects it to keep autorun.inf from executing if it is present.
  
• Wait until it has finished scanning and then exit the program.
  
• Reboot your computer when done.

Note: As part of its routine, Flash_Disinfector will create a hidden folder named autorun.inf in each partition and every USB drive that was plugged in when you ran it. Do not delete this folder...it will help protect your drives from future infection by keeping the autorun file from being installed on the root drive and running other malicious files.

Thank you for replying. To answer your question he temporarily loaned me the drive.
I ran the scan and it finished rather quickly (like 3 minutes) before the "Done!!" prompt appeared. Stil no change to the drive itself.
I also tried a chkdsk scan on the drive. I let it run for nearly six hours and came back. It was only at about 20% complete of Stage 1 out of 5... Also several hundreds of "File Record Segment xxxx is unreadable" appeared in the MSDOS prompt during this time.

This post has been edited by Tiltedecho: 05 April 2009 - 09:04 PM