Quite possible.I’m wondering if the disk went bad and that was creating all this trouble. Now that it’s ejected, I’ll see if the problem is gone. Won’t know till tomorrow.
When a mechanical (spinner, HHD) drive goes bad, the best you can hope for is to get it working long enough to pull the data off before sending it to recycling. You do that by running Disk Utility on it, sometimes over and over, till it either seizes or shows green at the end. Any such "repair" is temporary at best and false hope in most cases. I have never repaired an HHD and had it not fail soon after — not once.
If you already have a backup, Time Machine etc. just remove the drive and send to recycling.
Still replace that battery.