mark luiQ- I am using an external hard drive of 2 TB fixed on my system. I have stored 1.8 TB of files, videos, pictures on that drive. Now the issue is when it is plugged in, it sometimes shows disappears but after few seconds, it shows appears. It is showing a message “you need to format the disk in drive H: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?” I don’t want to format it because doing this can lost all my data from the drive. Is there anyone who can suggest me the solution of this problem?
I understand your problem and can experience the issue of data loss as it happened to me a month ago. On the basis of my experience, I would like to suggest you first restart your system. Hopefully, you will not get the error again and your issue will be resolved.
After going through your issue, my suggestion to you is to connect the hard drive to another operating system and see whether it read the files correctly or not because maybe there is some issue with your system. If it works for you, nothing can be much better than this.
I have gone through the same issue a week ago, I ran an anti-virus software to check the issues or bugs in my external hard drive and this works for me. It kills all the bad sectors from my hard drive. Hope, this will work for you.
If the above discussed methods do not work for you. You can check your hard drive for errors. Here are the steps for checking –
- Go to Start button and open Run Window. You can simply open it by shortcut and for this press Win key and R together
- Type “cmd” and press enter
- Type “chkdsk n:/f” (replace n with the true drive letter)
- Press Enter
- It will start repairing the damaged files and you will see some of your filenames before if finally asks if you want to save the lost chains to another location. Click Yes in this case.
- Wait till this process is running. Once the process finished. Your external hard drive works normally.
If you don’t want to waste your time in checking and following the manual methods. You can directly go for a third-party application named Power Data Recovery. The software works greatly on all Windows OS. With this, you will be able to recover your audios, videos, pictures etc. In this case, you can recover your data and hence you will not find need to format your hard drive.
I have understood your issue and would like to recommend you to save your data before formatting your disk and for this, you can go for various third-party tools. I used EaseUS file recovery software a week ago when the same issue happened to me. It is a very simple technique to recover your files from the external hard drive, SD Card, USB Drive or other devices to PC.
Thank you so much. I have used this tool and it worked perfectly for me. With this tool, I have saved my crucial files and folders present in the Hard drive. Format disk problem can be solved by the tool for me.
I have recovered all my files from the hard drive but when I open these files, some are unable to open, however, they were in the good condition earlier. Now how can I access or recover these corrupt files? Kindly suggest a solution for this.
I don’t know the solution but I can only say that there are various third-party tools available in the market that will help you to recover and access your corrupt files.
You can simply take a backup of your files stored in your hard drive and later on format the hard drive into use. These are the steps for it –
- Open your computer
- Right Click the external hard drive
- Click format > Start > Ok
- Your external hard drive will be reusable for storing new data again
