Hard drive having trouble reading?

[ultraman7k]

Just noticed this today but whenever I try to access files on my 1 TB WD Green drive, it is taking absolutely forever. I'm used to it unparking itself to access memory, and I can usually hear it, but not today. It is pretty silent.

You can find folders and such, but often times the file preview itself in the folder takes forever to load, if it ever does. I tried transferring a file from one drive to another, but it showed no progress, though cancelling it showed that it copied some of the files over. If I try to open a file, the program it is associated with hangs and crashes.

Is my hard drive slowly dying, or is it something else?

Thanks.

[frontier204]

Are other drives working just fine? If so, then it's the hard disk, the cable, or the filesystem. I'm thinking cable or drive, because if it was filesystem, your OS would let you know in an instant.

Try running WD's diagnostic against it - the SHORT test. Given what you're experiencing, it should fail quite quickly with an error code that can help you figure out what may be going on.
WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Caviar Green / GP
If the test passes, then run chkdsk against the drive to check the filesystem.

Don't do any "repairing" of the drive if you need to get data off it.