External drive is damaged and freezes my Mac. Any way to recover? I'll explain everything in a clearer way.
I have a WD My Passport Studio external hd, since a while it's impossible to read it and here's the symptoms:


When I mount it and try to open the main folder, it is empty, but I
can see the content with ls from terminal. 
Every action takes a lot of time (like trying to fix it in Disk Utility) and always fails. 
I can't unmount it, it just doesn't and I have to reboot.


I think the partition is somehow damaged but I can't solve the problem. any clues?
First Steps: Repair the Disk, Tell Us What Happens

What exactly is happening isn't something I know. However, with a damaged disk, the first step should be to attempt to diagnose/repair it. Since that didn't work, tell us what went wrong. It'll give us a lot of insight into what may have happened and how we can fix it.

Since You Can't Repair The Disk

It's possible (although unusual) that using the command line fsck will help. Follow this guide and let us know what happens.

Command Line?

This doesn't seem like it should work, but if the disk is accessible from the command line, you could just use command-line copy paste. This doesn't seem like it should work, but you never know.

Data Recovery

No one likes it, but you may have to just reformat your partition after taking it to a data recovery service.