I’ve been using a 4TB wd passport HDD for a while for media. It was working great on windows with no issue. One day, i tried to use it on a Ubuntu machine which was not able to mount it. I run a few commands without deep knowledge of what i was doing (fsck) and i was able to mount it. However it was very slow and causing some weird issues like preventing a shutdown without unplugging.
I quickly realized that i was not able to access the drive anymore anywhere, on windows it freezes explorer and any tool thay deal with disks, on linux i just can’t detect it in /dev and it also make everything unstable. I suspect that it did some damage when i unplugged it?
Is there anyway to recover the drive (not the data) without throwing it in the garbage?
Sounds like the drive is dead. They are mechanical devices which tend to wear out with use. Literally magnetic platters spinning at 7200rpm with heads floating on a cushion of air a few microns above the surface. Just a single speck of dust that gets in there can absolutely destroy the drive, as can moving it while it’s spinning, or it could have a manufacturing defect that causes it to prematurely fail for no other reason whatsoever.
The best you can really hope for is that the drive is still covered under warranty and get it replaced by Western Digital.