Windows – What will happen if I format the external hard drive

external hard driveformatwindows 7

I have an external HD, it's maybe 3 years old.

It's 1 TB and is almost full at this stage, 950+ gigs used up.

There a several folders, movies, music, tv shows, etc… When I open some, I get a similar pop-up to the following:

enter image description here

But when I try to open other folders, it works fine.

Two questions:

  1. What will happen if I Format disk, will I lose everything on the drive?

  2. Why would only some folders cause this pop-up and not all?

Best Answer

If you format you will erase all the that is stored on this drive!

Windows will as for a drive to be formatted when it cannot read/see the information it tries to access. So probably not all folders are damaged. This could happen due to file system corruption or because of too many bad sectors.

In this situation I recommend that you

  1. back up all the information to a different internal/external HDD. You MUST use a Tool that supports "sektor by sektor copy".

  2. Only after that download the HDD manufacturers diagnostics tool and test it.

  3. If it doesn't detect any problems you can also try to run CHKDSK.

CHKDSK can detect and in some cases correct those errors. However it's possible that during this process some of the information stored on the HDD would be lost. Before running CHKDSK make sure to backup all your important data. Please remember that once you start CHKDSK you should not interrupt it or you might corrupt your HDD.

To run CHKDSK:

  • Open My Computer
  • Right-click on the drive in question. Go to Properties.
  • Select the "Tools" tab
  • In the Error-checking area, click .
  • If this is your system drive Windows will want to schedule the check for the next reboot.

Be patient it could take some time.

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