With only 8GB RAM your node can't hold the chainstate fully in memory and has to do a lot of I/O to your HDD (painfully slow at random access I/O) to properly build the UTXO set which is stored in the chainstate folder. Full sync on HDD without lots of RAM will be snail slow and your HDD won't like the workload. A synced chainstate folder is about 12GB large.
Have you checked if your HDD is still OK? By which interface is your HDD connected to your node?
Is it intentional that you have a pruned node which doesn't store more than 2GB of block data? You could store an unpruned blockchain on your 1TB HDD if it's not used for anything else.
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If he deletes chainstate folder, his pruned node will have to re-download the whole blockchain again. Apparently the same is needed when he deletes the blocks folder.
So my HDD should be fine, i did run checkdisk.
it is connected internally via sata.
ok its good to know the ram thing, maybe i will upgrade it.
i just (in a thread above mentioned, with reddit link) tried to start "-reindex-chainstate". i gave my an error saying cant to it in pruned mode.
So i did just -reindex and its now doing it. guessing that will take quite some time...
i will report back if it fixed it. (and if not try the other methods you guys suggested.)