Gfilui

I am working with Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS and I have a Seagate external drive to backup data from windows 10 and Ubuntu, using rsync script (through cygwin in Windows).

WHAT HAPPENED:

I was running rsync script from windows 10 but I had to stop it (using Ctrl+C keys) because it got extremely slow. After that, I was not able to access any longer the hard disk from windows 10.

Current behaviour Windows 10:

When I connect the disk, the system tries to access it continuously and the overall system slows down a lot. Looking at the Task manager I see that the disk is always used 100%. However, windows always fails to access drive.

Current behaviour Ubuntu 16.04:

When I connect the hard drive, and I try to open it, I get the following message:

Impossible to access to volume %X
An operation is already pending

where %X is the name of the drive.

Then, when I unplug the hard drive, I get the following message:

Error mounting /dev/sdb2 at /media/uzzen-sweet/Seagate Expansion
Drive: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o
"uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000" "/dev/sdb2"
"/media/uzzen-sweet/Seagate Expansion Drive"' exited with non-zero
exit status 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Errore di
input/output Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Errore di input/output NTFS
is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate it
and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details. Failed to sync device /dev/sdb2: Errore di
input/output Failed to close volume /dev/sdb2: Errore di input/output

Any advice on how I can fix the problem minimizing the risk of losing the data in the hard drive?
Thank you very much in advance for your assistance.

Cheers,
Fastest

Seems that the slowdown you experienced is symptom of your hard drive failure. To rescue data, you need expertise to identify the failure on your hard drive. Best you can do in that situation is try to duplicate your hard drive as soon as possible to another, every rescue attempt makes your data more compromised. To duplicate drive, you can use dd or in case your drive fails to read sectors: ddrescue. If you cannot get your data out (due to hardware errors), i suggest contacting data recovery specialist if the contents matter.