I have a 1TB Western Digital hard drive which is almost full and last time I tried to plug it into my laptop, I got a Windows dialog saying "this hard drive needs to be formatted". I did not panic because I have experienced things like this before and I know it's often solved by simply re-inserting the drive.

Now however, whenever I plug it in and try to browse it in explorer by going to "computer", the explorer process crashes after a while. I simply close explorer since it takes ages trying to read the disk and nothing happens.

After searching on the internet, the best thing to do would be a chkdsk. I tried it via properties in explorer (which also took a good 5 minutes to open up), locks up as well, after waiting a couple of minutes it says there's no access to the disk so a chkdsk is not possible...

I want to make clear that I always use safe removal before pulling out the USB cable. Last time however, safe removal just would not work and when trying to shut down Windows, the logoff screen just would not disappear (I've waited at least 10 minutes or so) and I powered off the PC by force. This may be the cause of the problems but the disk was still recognised immediately after that.

I really don't want to format this thing because it contains C: clones of 3 computers and a lot of other stuff that I don't want to re-copy. What would be the best course of action?

Update

I got chkdsk working via the command line. I used the /F and /R options. I already got a bunch of lines saying "file record segment X is unreadable" or whatever it is in English, my OS is Dutch. It looks bad... Will chdsk repair these errors?