I have an external hard drive which worked fine and it is my backup harddrive. There are also some files on it that I would really want to keep. It's a 400GB Freecom drive in FAT32.
All of a sudden, after not using my HDD for a week or 6, a message pops up with: "You need to format your disk in drive X".
I tried a couple of solutions that I found, but they give different results:
sfc /scannowin the command line tells me that everything is fine. All drives work great.- I checked 'Disk Management' and deleted the hard drive letter and added it to another one. Didn't help.
- I checked the hard drive on another PC, same message.
- I did a Deep Search in Recuva. It only returned 50 mb of files.
- I ran an analyse in TestDisk. It returned that there are no partitions found on the hard drive. 'Disk Management' does say that there is one primary partition.
Did I do something to my HDD in the meantime? No, it was just laying in a clean drawer. Could somebody please tell me what is wrong with my external HDD?
Best Answer
The error which you are getting is common error faced by lots of users and in this situation TestDisk helps out. As you already try this so, I suggest you to avoid do something with hard drive and simply use a good data recovery software to recover data from hard drive. First try demo version of software that will show you all recoverable data then buy it after satisfied with preview of recoverable data. After a successful recovery of data you can formate your hard drive.