External Hard Drive Needs to Be Formatted/How to Recover Inaccessible Files?

External Hard Drive Has Not Formatted Error

User1: I plugged my Toshiba 320GB external hard drive in my computer, but I was unable to access one folder on the external hard drive. When I tried to access it, windows asks me to format the disk drive. There is no problem to access the other folders on the external hard drive. I tried to look for a useful solution but really felt confused that I have no idea how to deal with the problem. The inaccessible folder contains my little son’s photos, videos so I don’t want to risk losing those files by formatting the external hard drive. Please help me out!

User2: My Windows7 computer shows me disk drive needs to be formatted before I can use it when I double click on my 2TB Seagate external hard drive. It worked fine previously and I can access all files on the external hard drive yesterday. Now I doubt why the windows shows me such an error message. I don’t want to format the external hard drive but I can’t access the drive. Can somebody give me a hand to access the drive or get the data off the external hard drive?

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Troubleshoot External Hard Drive Not Formatted Problem & Restore Inaccessible Data

The similar problem like above is frequently asked by different people here and there. Before I share the method on how to solve the not formatted error on your external hard drive, I would like to share you some possible causes for the external hard drive not formatted error. Below are the possible reasons: your external hard drive is damaged, files or external hard drive has been attacked by virus, etc.

One method to solve the problem is format the external hard drive directly and then you can access the dive, but all files are erased after formatting. The other way is to cancel formatting the external hard drive but perform a data recovery on the external hard drive. After data recovery, you can continue to format the drive to access it. If you want to restore data, you can use external drive recovery software, which is free and powerful for any data recovery. For more information about not formatted error, you can refer to best solution for not formatted error.

References

External drive raw to ntfs

Hard disk drive unformat error

USB drive not recognized

Convert raw to ntfs

Deleted partition data recovery