One of my new(ish) WD HDD Black drives has finally stopped working and now I can't even open it with windows without it asking me to format it. My MB bios recognizes it and crystaldiskinfo says it has 1 "reallcoated sectors count", which seems bad. I didn't drop it, I didn't move it, I haven't deployed an EMP in my room, it just randomly stopped working. This drive has all of my work and college files on it and i'm fucked if I have to format it. It's only about 2 years old, and I bought these 2 bastards expecting all of my storage issues to finally be resolved, but it's been slow to read/write since day 1.
So far i've tried swapping the SATA cables out and using crystal disk info, unplugging the other drives on my PC doesn't seem to do anything. CHKDSK tells me the file system is RAW and it cant run on RAW. convert drive: /fs:ntfs also tells me you can't convert RAW drives.
What are my options here? It's causing my PC to lock up when it is plugged in, and I absolutely cannot lose the data on the drive. What are some recommended free data recovery software? If I can just get my data off formatting should fix the problem.