Good morning, so i took out an hdd from an old computer and try to copy its files, mainly old photo and some videos. The total files are less than 15gb.

If i copy more than may be 5 or 6 folders, it will start and then suddenly the copying dialog box just poof and nothing is copied.

No warning and error displayed, if copy individually then it can be copied successfully.

If a folder contains too much many files inside it sometimes auto stop as well.

Is there some kind or copy limit or something like that? Or the older hdd just can't support too much reading or reading for a long time?

This post has been edited by pandah: Jan 25 2023, 10:42 AM

Do a hdd scan first.

use robocopy
google it for how to use

Check and scan old HDD health

I believe hardware related issue sure have error. It is more like Windows related issue.

Press Windows button on your keyboard then type Command Prompt, right click on it as select Run as Administrator. Then type SFC /scannow and press Enter. Let it do its thing.

Once it completed, reboot your computer. Then try again.

Unfortunately the drive is no longer accessible, manage to copy most of the files, and now it just spin and can't be detected, making the explorer so slow that it hangs.

When it still can be accessed, it makes cmd hang, disk management also hang.

There is no ticking sound or scratch sound, the small control board just get very hot and do nothing. Maybe the board is damaged instead of the disk?

Maybe there is a problem with the hard disk

Download Hiren boot ISO, burned into a disk and boot it.

You can try copy the files while in Hiren OS, it works exactly like windows only it runs on disk instead of HDD.

Yup. Symptoms of dying drives.

Seems like bad sector. Suggest you to scan first

better use a copy manager with log
that will tell you what happen, and give you a failure log

else do a comparison file size and quantity see they match or not

else, could be long file path or something

your path is long long one?

Yes, most probably it is the HDD circuit board will fail too over time, or eventually.