How do i open the external hard drive when it says it needs formatting.

[hnnjwa]

I have a portable 1Tb hard drive i have been using now and have important of files on there - all of a sudden it is coming up as an drive & says I need to format it. I'm devastated I may lose all my files - can anyone help tell me what to do?
i try to open it but it the text box keep asking me to format because the file is corrupted. so sad.
i found this link but i don't know how to use it either
how to use the software from the link given http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec ? Can someone tell me how does it work?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Photorec software won't help you with that particular problem since it requires that the drive is readable by Windows, which it isn't.

With external hard drives there is a "bridge-chip" inside the enclosure which handles the interface conversion to USB, and this chip can fail, leaving the drive unreadable even though the drive itself may be completely okay.

When that happens, the best thing to try is to extract the drive from it's enclosure (a challenge in itself since there are no screws) and buy a third-party external enclosure for it.

Your worry about maybe losing all your data is of your own making. Keeping all your data on a single drive means you have no backups, and that's just foolish. The data should have been stored on at least two separate drives (my data is on four external drives, each drive an exact copy of the other three). Overkill maybe, but I learned the hard way that backups are vital.

 

[uchetil]

Try running chkdsk.

open a command prompt, in windows 7: Start, All Programs, Accessories, command prompt, (right click on command prompt and run it as administrator...
in the window that opened type:
chkdsk Z: /x
(Substitute your problem drive's letter for the Z!)
This fixes the most common cause for the "your drive needs to be formatted error... corrupted data.
Good luck.