Windows 7 wants me to format external hard drive.

Question

I have specially used an external hard drive to store some connected interesting videos and images. Up to now, about 94 videos and 168 pictures are held there. But, this afternoon, when trying to add more pictures to this drive on my computer, the Windows 7 just gave a not formatted error and asked me to format before opening. But there are still about 10 videos and 68 pictures stored there last weekend that have not been backed up yet. Is there any way for me to get these videos and pictures out from this drive at first? Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

When this happens, it means that there is or was a problem with the drive. Before attempting any possible operations related to the partition structure, I recommend on unplugging the drive then plug it back. In most of the cases it should work and the drive should become available again. If it's not working, use an application to recover the data on the partition. Even if it says the drive is unformatted you should be able to recover its content using the mentioned application. There is a guide on their official website which explains the steps you need to follow in order to recover you data.

Answer 2

Without new files written on the same hard drive, your external hard drive information often will not really be missing. Therefore, save no more file on this drive and try to let all of them shown again. Follow the guidance of this video tutorial to see whether all of your drive data could be retrieved with success: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB5QtjzKqGI Hope this could give you some clues and help you out. Also prepare drive data backups regularly in the future.

Answer 3

Format this external hard drive? In fact, from my understanding, no matter whether you’ve formatted this drive, without replacing these original drive data with anything else, you do have chances to get all stuffs inside back with right data recovery software. So, in your case, save no more stuffs on this external hard drive and search a right data recovery program for your inaccessible drive data. Know more information of drive data recovery here: freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/03/hard-drive-not-formatted-error.html No matter what happens in the future, prepare drive data backups on different places all the time.