u/AaronC31

EDIT: Adding a screenshot from CDI of said drive here, as recommended by comment below.

Hey, fellas! First post here, and I’m looking for some advice on where to go from here.

About 8 months ago, I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and forgot to use Rufus to disable BitLocker during installation. My workstation is also my gaming PC, and at some point BitLocker appears to have started encrypting one of my secondary drives, a 3TB Seagate Barracuda used purely for gameplay recordings.

During the encryption process, something seems to have gone wrong around the 50% mark. The drive became EXTREMELY slow, to the point where even opening File Explorer would sometimes crash explorer.exe entirely. If I waited long enough, I could still browse the folders and see the files, but trying to play videos would usually only load a frame or two before hanging.

This drive contains about 2.5TB of gameplay clips going back nearly 20 years, from the old FRAPS days up through modern recordings. I'm not entirely sure of the drive age, as I bought it 2nd hand.

The slowdown got so bad that I eventually removed the drive from the PC entirely because it was affecting the whole system. Reboots were taking 10+ minutes instead of seconds.

Fast forward to now: I recently built a new workstation using only NVMe drives, and I decided to take another shot at recovering this drive. I bought a SATA dock, a DMDE license, and attempted to clone/image the drive onto an NVMe SSD.

DMDE estimated the clone would take over a month, and during the process the drive was still slowing the entire machine down heavily. At that point, I stopped the clone because I wasn’t sure if I was making things worse.

A few additional details:

• I was never prompted for a BitLocker recovery key when attempting to clone the drive
• The filesystem/folder structure is still visible
• I have not initialized, formatted, or written anything new to the drive

At this point, I’m trying to figure out whether:

• This sounds more like a failing drive issue complicated by BitLocker
• The interrupted BitLocker encryption itself may have corrupted things beyond practical recovery
• This is something a professional data recovery lab would realistically have a decent shot at recovering

The data isn’t financially important, but it’s very sentimental to me because it’s basically 20 years of gaming memories with friends.

So I'm trying to decide if it's worth having a Data Recovery company take a look at it, or if you guys possibly think it's just borked?

Thanks in advance for any guidance you guys can offer.