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Two days ago my 3TB WD HDD was working perfectly; yesterday it failed. It shows up in Disk Management as RAW.

Disk Management shows this exactly: Disk 1 Basic 2794.49 GB Online. (F:) 2794.49GB RAW Healthy (Primary Partition)

When I attempted to run chkdsk, it was unable to execute.

I have been running TestDisk for 1 day (it is creating a log file) and its 35% done right now, but the problem is that the computer I'm running TestDisk on has a less than 1TB hard drive, and I didn't realize until now that running TestDisk is apparently eating up hard drive space on my computer's HDD. So I assume this means I will not be able to finish running TestDisk, the log file will not be created, and the progress made thus far will all be lost. So this leaves me with two questions at this point:

1. I have over 2TB of data I wish to recover from this disk. How can I do it successfully and as quickly as possible?

2. Is data recovery using TestDisk done 1 file at a time? Or does it allow me to select and copy multiple folders at a time? I have a secondary backup external 3TB HDD that I intend to copy all my data to.

Thanks.

How long is the log file that is compiled by Testdisk right now?

The log file size is 825 GB as of this moment. My local HDD shows 25 GB of space left.

Your logfile is full of error messages. Stop Testdisk, publish your smart parameters before possibly duplicating the drive or sending it to a professional lab.

How to extract a log file containing the SMART parameters:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

I stopped TestDisk and downloaded smartmontools v7.2-1 and attempted to run the smartctl command many times via the instructions at the link you provided, but so far none has worked. I have tried the following commands so far without success:

smartctl -a /dev/sdf > myreport.txt
smartctl -a /dev/hdf > myreport.txt

smartctl -a -d sat,12 /dev/sdf > myreport.txt
smartctl -a -d sat,12 /dev/hdf > myreport.txt

smartctl -a -d sat,16 /dev/sdf > myreport.txt
smartctl -a -d sat,16 /dev/hdf > myreport.txt

Each time I entered the above commands, nothing happened. I checked the doc folder and found that no myreport.txt file had been created.

My hard drive is a Western Digital p/n WDBWLG0030HBK.

If you can't find the report use a full path instead of just putting in a file name:

...> C:\myreport.txt

This hint only applies with Windows operating systems!

Found it; thanks.

smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-win7-sp1] (sf-7.2-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Smartctl open device: /dev/sdf [SAT] failed: \\.\PhysicalDrive5: Open failed, Error=2

What does this mean?

Is the drive visible in Disk Management?

Yesterday while running all those commands and tests on it, including myreport.txt, it was showing this in Disk Management: Disk 1 Basic 2794.49 GB Online. (F:) 2794.49GB RAW Healthy (Primary Partition)

But today it's showing this in Disk Management: Disk 1 Basic 2794.49 GB Online. (F:) 2794.49 GB, and windows is still trying to communicate with it because it's showing the blue revolving loading or thinking symbol, and the Disk Management window says (Not Responding)

What type of type of drive is that?
External/ internal?
Please describe the whole connection chain to the mainboard including all elements and naming them.

By the way, the forum rules states:

Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.