Having issues opening a 1 tb hard drive (almost full) without the OS asking me t

tamell

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Sep 30, 2012
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10,510
As I said in the topic... thingy, I have a 1 terabyte drive full of games, music, and movies. I took it to a friend's house and came back to my place. I then plugged it into my laptop, which is running windows 7 (if that helps any), and now it is causing my windows explorer to crash, and is asking me to format it to open it. It recognizes that something is connected, but not that it's formatted, for some reason. I can't even right click on the drive to click on properties.

Is there a way to make it recognize the drive without having to format it?
 
My guess is Windows would be unable to format it even if you wanted it to.
I'm guessing it's an external USB hard drive of some description, and what often happens with these is that the USB converter board inside the enclosure fails.

This causes a communication error between the drive & your system, which means Windows can't read it properly, nor can it write to it (which is why attempting to format it will fail too).

I've never had to do this myself (I have four backup drives "mirrored" with the same data, so I just sling it and buy another when one fails) but I do know for sure that removing the drive and putting it into a third-party enclosure has done the trick for many people (I help on a lot of forums).

However, a failed converter board is not the only possible cause of your problem. It's a hard drive, and all hard drives fail eventually, especially those which get carried around regularly. So I recommend you try testing it with "SeaTools for Windows". I say "try" because SeaTools may even have problems accessing it.
Get "SeaTools for Windows" here: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/