recovering "corrupted and unreadable" data from external drive

[jg_clemens]

i needed to reinstall windows OS so i copied all my files (pictures, documents, music) to an external drive. everything was there and the external drive was working fine. i disconnected the external drive and did a factory restore. when i connected the external drive to copy files a window popped up and said the drive needed to be formatted. dos will not list files, "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". any suggestions???

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey jg_clements. Sometimes this happens when the drive is not "safely removed" before it's disconnected from the computer, in other cases, there's no such obvious reason. I'd suggest that you try the drive with a different cable and a different computer to see if the same thing happens. Other than that you could try accessing the external HDD via Linux Live USB/CD to see if the drive is recognized properly this way and if you can get to your data. If this doesn't work out, then I'd recommend that you try some of the data recovery solutions listed in this thread here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope that helps. Let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD