External Hard Disk Show "You Need to format the Drive before use".

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Hi Dear All,

My external HDD of 320GB shows "You need to format the drive before use". This is the second time I am facing the same problem. The first time when I got this message I formatted my external HDD. After one week I am getting the same message. There is some important data in some folders.So I am not able to format it again. I changed the case and circuit board of the HDD but still I am getting the same issue. There is one more problem. My HDD is not detected by Windows7 32 bit. but it is working fine with windows7 64 bit. I have run the "CHKDSK" utility in command prompt for this HDD.After that I could open only one Drive(there are 3 drives in my HDD)other two drives are inaccessible.But I could get only one folder in that drive there are so many folders in that drive.Now it shows only one folder and all other folders are invisible but the used space of the drive is not changed(i.e. all data exists there but I am not able to see that)I have tried "dir/ah" command in command prompt but it does not show any other folder names.All other 2 drives are still inaccessible. Could anyone please tell me how to avoid this format message with out erasing any data from my HDD. kindly tell me how to get all my data without formatting and with out using any recovery tools.

Thank You...

Posted 19-May-14 18:23pm

SubhashRokzzz

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Abhinav S · Answer 1 · 2014-05-19T18:28:00

Solution 1

I suggest you contact customer support for the PC or the hard disk.
If the hard drive is damaged, you might still be under warranty and it may be possible to change it.

Posted 19-May-14 18:28pm

Abhinav S

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SubhashRokzzz 20-May-14 0:36am

Thank you very much Abhinav S for your reply. I would like to get all my data first.

Maciej Los · Answer 2 · 2014-05-19T19:51:00

Download Hiren's BootCD 15.2[^] and burn an image on CD/DVD[^]. Connect external drive to computer. Restart desktop computer/laptop and run Linux system from CD/DVD. Finally, run Parted Magic software and check for errors on HDD. There is other DOS and Linux software to check and repair HDD and its MBR[^], etc.

Bernhard Hiller · Answer 3 · 2014-05-19T22:22:00

1. Do not mix up "drive" and "partition". Looks like you have 3 partitions on one drive.
2. Does the device have its own power supply? If not, make sure that the computer where it is plugged in provides enough power over USB! You may need to check different USB ports on the machine, or even add an "active" USB hub (i.e. a USB hub with external power supply).
The external drive may already be damaged - and then repair / data recovery may fail.

External Hard Disk Show "You Need to format the Drive before use".

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