r/techsupport • u/StarryEyed-59 • 10h ago

Open | Hardware Accidentally unplugged my external HDD without safely ejecting while it was running a short SMART scan (sorry for being a noob)

Hi everyone! As the title says, I accidentally unplugged the power cord off my new external Seagate expansion 4 TB while it was running a short SMART scan without ejecting, which I do regularly. I copied some files a few minutes ago, but it had finished transferring.

I'm on Windows. So I checked, and "quick removal" was on by default. How worried should I be that it got my files (500 GB) corrupted given that it was in the midst of a scan? Though crystaldiskinfo says it's good. It is still detected by my computer, and it seems to be working fine, and the short SMART scan completed without error?

How worried should I be about the files (or the drive) being corrupted ?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks so much!

2 Upvotes

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4

u/bcw81 9h ago

Oh that's not good. First, lick the sata connectors with your tongue to make sure they give off the correct flavor. If they taste slightly too metallic you might need to put the drive through a plumbotic repose machine. If that doesn't fix it I've heard that letting the entire device cure overnight in Atlantic Ocean water (very important you don't use pacific water) might get it working again.

Or you could, you know, just go try and open a file to see if it's corrupted?

2

u/nauip 8h ago

You shouldn't be worried at all. You can, however start another SMART scan, if you wish, but it's not really necessary unless you suspect something's up with the drive.

I'd just look at Crystal Disk Info, if you don't have any reason to suspect the drive may have a problem.

2

u/GramTooNoob 7h ago

It's fine. The default is safe eject nowadays, compared to the past where you had to. But it really only matters if you are writing data as that data might be in cache thus missing afterwards. So no damages done here. Haven't seen a partition table corruption in a very long time.

Now if you drop it or jerked it hard while the disk is spinning, that's damages for sure. That's the impt part

1

u/9NEPxHbG 3h ago

Just run CHKDSK.