External Hard drive asking to format

[dominator17]

Hi everyone, I have got a 1TB external verbatim hard drive, it has recently come up and says that i need to format the drive before i can use it . i have opened the casing taken it out and put it back in, i have bought a new cable for it, but still have no clue what is wrong, i have about 200GB of files and cannot transfer them. any advice?

 

[willard]

Sounds like your drive is corrupted. If the data is very important, I'd recommend taking it to a data recovery specialist. It won't be cheap, but they might be able to get your data back.

There are ways you can do it yourself, but they aren't simple and I don't recommend doing it because you can cause further degradation of the data. If it's not too hard to replace the data, it might be easiest to just wipe the disk out and start over.

Be sure to run a diagnostic on the drive before you put it back into service, though. The drive may by defective, in which case you're going to run into the same problem eventually.